The MER-RSM Coordinating Committee will produce a general plan to intervene into CEGEPs or colleges that can provide guidance for local sections to intervene in institutions in their areas.

Be it further resolved that this plan provide a strategy given the perceived limitations within these institutions that would make organizing in these institutions dissimilar from our experience in universities. This should be achieved through gathering information from the experience of the MER-RSM members currently or historically in CEGEPs or colleges.

Be it further resolved that this plan be available to MER-RSM members by August 18th, 2017 to provide ample time to plan interventions for the beginning of the fall semester.

Be it further resolved that where sections exist in the same area of a CEGEP or College where the MER-RSM does not have a presence, that those sections be mandated to engage in preliminary social investigation where capacity exists – up to and including the initiation of a new section.

Ideological Advancement

The MER-RSM Coordinating Committee will develop a reading list for sections and members who have finished the basics course, and ensure that courses are accessible upon the organization’s website.

Be it further resolved that the MER-RSM Coordinating Committee compile a recommended reading list for both the basics and advanced course, and ensure that courses are accessible upon the organization’s website.

General Assembly Campaign Propaganda

The MER-RSM Coordinating Committee will centralize all of the propaganda materials from previous General Assemblies campaigns and make them accessible to all sections.

Be it further resolved that the Coordinating Committee create propaganda specific for General Assemblies campaigns.

Plan for starting the Transformative Justice Committee.

The MER-RSM Coordinating Committee is tasked with providing an open mechanism for MER-RSM members or people in our periphery to launch complaints against members that may have engaged in patriarchal, transphobic, racist, ableist, etc. behaviour or violence, which includes a process of investigation, mediation and rectification.

Be it further resolved that upon receiving a complaint that the MER-RSM Coordinating Committee strike an Ad Hoc Transformative Justice Committee, of members of the Coordinating Committee and the MER-RSM members that are not directly tied to the incident presented, to investigate the complaint, and proceed forward with a rectification process if necessary.

Be it further resolved that a list of comrades that would be willing to act for the Transformative Justice Committee be compiled along with a list of their relevant skills.

Be it further resolved that a list of resources be created to aid in the work of both the MER-RSM Coordinating Committee and Transformative Justice Committee going forward in this matter. This list should also be made available to leadership of every section.
Be it further resolved that any member of the MER-RSM who has a complaint that they wish to be investigated by the Transformative Justice Committee and Coordinating Committee has the right to contact their regional organizer or any Coordinating Committee member; to be represented by another member if they wish, and to have that complaint dealt with as soon as possible. Should the complainant be in an emergency situation, the Transformative Justice Committee and Coordinating Committee should provide as much support as possible.

Regional Events for 2018

Be it resolved that for the 2017-2018 school year regional organizers are tasked with holding regional events of either a political, organizational or social character.

Be it further resolved that the next Pan-Canadian MER-RSM Congress be held in 2019.
Peterborough delegation has offered to host the next regional event and potentially the next Congress.

Financial Motion

Be it resolved that all sections of the MER-RSM take on fundraising initiatives and aim to apply for institutional funding wherever possible.

Publication

Be it resolved that each section commits to preparing at least one article per issue for the publication before the next congress.

Be it further resolved that the publication produce an issue at least once a year.

CAFE

Coordinating Committee of MER-RSM will produce guidelines on how to oppose CAFE and other MRA organizing with the goal of shutting such organizing down.
Be it further resolved that Coordinating Committee of MER-RSM produce propaganda for all sections organizing to oppose CAFE and other MRA groups. Likewise, sections currently engaged in anti-MRA work should centralize existing propaganda.

Proletarian Education

Be it resolved that the MER-RSM Coordinating Committee be tasked with synthesizing an analysis of what proletarian education is to look like and what a proletarian student is.

Be it further resolved that the MER-RSM Coordinating Committee be tasked with seeking input from sections on these political questions.

Gender Oppressed Worker’s Day

The MER-RSM sections will hold events on March 8th under the banner of Gender Oppressed Worker’s Day, and promote a celebration of Proletarian Feminism and revolutionary gender oppressed people.

Solidarity with International League of People’s Struggles

The MER-RSM affirms our solidarity with member organizations of ILPS, where appropriate, in order to strengthen and concretize our international solidarity work.

Strategic Plan of the MER-RSM

The MER-RSM affirms that the organization of proletarian students, and building towards revolution in Canada is its primary goal.

Be it further resolved that the MER-RSM adopt, as its immediate strategic orientation, the achievement of general assemblies with an eye towards organizing strikes.

Be it further resolved that the MER-RSM adopts the following general plan of action:

MER-RSM sections should, where possible, campaign for the creation of General Assemblies, in which every student gets a vote and can initiate motions, as the highest decision making body of their respective student organizations. This includes but is not limited to unions, federations and associations.

Due to the contours of student politics in English Canada, MER-RSM sections should initially work towards campus-wide General Assemblies.

Once General Assemblies have been won within a student organization, MER-RSM sections should work towards program or faculty level General Assemblies.

Campaigns for General Assemblies should take on a life and organizational form independent from the MER-RSM, but remains connected to and led politically by the MER-RSM.

When General Assemblies have been achieved, MER-RSM sections should initiate controversial left-wing motions in order to build quorum and hype around the General Assemblies. This can include things like abolishing the student union council, condemning the occupation of Afghanistan, or other issues which will serve to separate the advanced and intermediate from the backwards.

As soon as possible, MER-RSM sections should put forward motions to hold a one day strike putting forward demands based on the 2015 Red Spring Day of Action as a basic program.

As more MER-RSM sections are able to organize strikes, MER-RSM sections should begin to coordinate with each other to hold strikes on the same days. This can continue to expand and grow in scale.

The strategic goal of this process is the holding of an unlimited student strike across Canada, in which the RSM is a leading political force.

Be it further resolved that the MER-RSM affirms that this is not a stagist conception of revolution, where at the end of this process revolution will spontaneously emerge. Instead, the RSM should understand this process as a strategy which will train and attract cadre and build capacity.

Be it further resolved that the MER-RSM at no point in this process stop engaging in independent, anti-capitalist and revolutionary propaganda. Nor should the MER-RSM ever liquidate itself into the general movement, and should instead constantly advance its own promises and positions even while leading campaigns of lower political unity.

Be it further resolved that the MER-RSM Coordinating Committee should begin looking towards the creation of a short general program of promises, which touches on the immediate needs of proletarian and oppressed students. This program should form the basis of the demands advanced during strikes. It should concretize the political positions of the MER-RSM Coordinating Committee.

Consolidation of Organizational Documents

The MER-RSM Coordinating Committee consolidate all our documents in French and English relating to methods of organization and how to conduct ourselves. These documents should then be translated and distributed to every section and also made available to new sections and organizers as necessary.

Be it further resolved that this should take the form of a package that includes checklists for different kinds of events as well as guidelines for weekly meetings and also all report templates. In addition to this material any documents already in circulation should be included.

Solidarity with RSM Sudbury in the face of State Repression

The MER-RSM condemns the Sudbury Police and Ontario Provincial Police for their actions against RSM Sudbury.

The entire MER-RSM stands in solidarity with RSM Sudbury during this difficult time, and we offer them any assistance they deem necessary to continue the good work they are doing in Sudbury.

Solidarity with Igor Sadikov

The MER-RSM stands in full solidarity with Igor Sadikov against Zionist attacks, and we uphold his critique of Zionism.

RSM-York is pleased to announce our new campus newspaper, The Outcry!
You can read our first issue by clicking the link above. We’ll have a new one for you every month!

Why a left wing paper?
At York University, there is no paper that truly represents and expresses the interests of working class, marginalized, and oppressed students. There is no paper committed to speaking about anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-misogyny, anti-transphobia, anti-homophobia, and anti-ableism. Some of these topics may be mentioned sometimes in Excalibur, but they are often presented with a “both-sides” slant in an attempt to be “unbiased”. Outcry will be unapologetically left-wing, providing a platform for left-wing groups and students on campus. It will allow students who are active or inactive with politics on campus to understand and get involved with what’s happening politically on campus. Outcry will provide left-wing commentary and critiques of events and groups on campus, and groups can broadcast meetings and events if they choose to. As the paper develops, it can become a medium between people and groups, in ways such as questions and responses between students and groups.

Are you a York student or resident in the nearby area, and interested in writing for the Outcry?
Send us an email @ OutcryYorkU@gmail.com
or
Message and Like us on: facebook.com/rsmyork

This report represents the current understanding of the Coordinating Committee of the Revolutionary Student Movement on the state of the class struggle in the education sector. We proceed by examining the state of the education sector itself, then on to its foil, the student movement. Finally, we conclude with a critical appraisal of our organization’s history.

Our analysis, while far from complete, represents the summation of three years of work in forming the RSM and bringing the class struggle to campuses across Canada. The analysis represents the knowledge we have gained through the process of social investigation through trying to change our conditions, as well as the experience of leading and engaging in several large movements: TransformUS at the University of Saskatchewan, the Maple Spring, the Spring 2015 movement, the CUPE 3902/3903 strikes, and the GA campaign at uOttawa. We hope that the analysis contained here proves useful for all revolutionary students in Canada, and serves to guide our work in the years to come.

A. The Education Sector in Canada

Overview

A1. Though the development of capital and austerity measures have had incredible effects across all parts of society, their influences upon education are of particular interest as they define the situation that the Revolutionary Student Movement works within.

A2. Universities were initially developed as labour organizations, designed to protect the interests of academics and students from broader social pressure and power systems that would undermine the value of principled enquiry and knowledge dissemination. In time, universities developed into a means by which certain classes –sometimes ruling and sometimes subordinate- would produce and reproduce themselves. Under capitalism, the university was first a tool for the reproduction of the bourgeoisie and those tasked with the ideological defence of the bourgeoisie. It was only in the post-war period that university educations in Canada were extended to a large portion of the white-settler population, including the working class, as a means of building a mass of skilled workers to work in an advanced industrial economy. Over the past fifty years, the internally democratic functioning of universities in Canada has substantively withered away as a result of increased influence by governments in the functioning of institutions. More recently, universities have been fully subsumed under the logic of capital, which has incited joint-action between universities and capital such as the prioritization of certain programs, corporate partnerships, and the introduction of bureaucratic managerial measures to run Post-Secondary Education (PSE) institutions.

A3. The restructuring of PSE across Canada has been part of a decades long shift to redefine the purpose of education, away from what was a highly subsidized institution to train people to work as well as provide them with a liberal education, towards one that focuses its abilities towards job training, the reproduction of capitalist culture, and sells its education as a commodity intended to promote the future financial position of buyers.

A4. This commodification of education has led to expanding the market of consumers to include larger elements of the proletariat and oppressed nations, largely through an increase in available credit towards them and inflating the need for education in the labour force. This however has coincided with a rapid trend of increasing tuition costs and exploitative amounts of debt that students have to take on to pay their fees.

A5. A major shift that has occurred to overcome funding shortfalls from austerity is increasing the burden that students must take on in enrolling in University. The proportion of tuition fees that are currently collected for university revenues has more than doubled in the past three decades. Over the past 30 years we have seen a rapid reduction in the amount of funding that PSE receives from both the federal provincial governments, where in many places across Canada these institutions were receiving near to 80% of their total resources from public funding. Now most institutions receive roughly 55-65%, most of which comes from provincial sources. This has forced institutions to seek other sources of revenue and cost cutting measures to ensure the viability of their programs.

A6. Currently across Canada, graduates of university with student loans are expected to leave with nearly $27 000 in debt, and the overall average debt of recent graduates is roughly $15 000. This debt has an overwhelming impact on the life choices of graduate who will be forced to focus on paying off their debts rather than other goals. Given current work opportunities, 1 in 4 graduates will have to enter into an entry level job, likely one which does not apply to their area of study, just to pay off their student debts. This leads nearly 15% of graduates to default on their loans each year, while filing bankruptcy in most circumstances will not affect student debt until 7 years have after they have graduated. In this way, debt disproportionately effects students from proletarian class backgrounds, and ensures that despite education supposedly acting as an equalizer, students that are not “independently wealthy” will be forced to take on proletarian jobs. Thus, the university is consciously structured to enforce and reproduce class divisions within Canadian society.

Furthermore, on some campuses ancillary levies disadvantage proletarian students by making essential aspects of the student community opt out which leads to a difficult position making proletarian students choose between trying to save money through opting out and getting access to services such as rent advocacy, or child care. It also means that these essential services are placed on students as opposed to being ensured funding without necessarily ensuring any independence.

A7. This continues to inform why poor and proletarian youth are poorly represented in universities, while these debts will disproportionately burden women, Transgendered, and Indigenous peoples and other oppressed peoples who systemically face marginalized incomes.

A8. Graduate retention programs that aim to keep graduates within the province or country are being cut or reformed to save money in provincial budgets. This increases the burden of education upon students and extenuates the issues of student debt. While similarly, government provided grants are being reformed to either reduce the costs, or in certain situations incentivise certain topics of education or research in a manner that is more covert than direct funding. As a result, students are subsidized to enter programs of importance to industry, reproducing and hegemonizing capitalist-colonial ideology by offering avenues for proletarian and oppressed nation students to be upwardly mobile.

A9. Austerity measures have exacerbated the capitalist alignment of institutions by further developing pressure to seek alternative funding methods in the private sector. Though traditional post-secondary institution formally maintain collegial structures, power has largely concentrated into a growing bureaucratic and managerial tier of administrators and overseeing Board of Governors that are predominantly representatives of local governments and industry. Their modus operandi is to function as an arm of capital which will faithfully shift the burdens of austerity onto students, faculty and staff.

A10. This change has to do with a shift in the Canadian economy which has seen service and management jobs increase at the expense of industrial jobs. This means that people are being educated to manage workers, rather than rising through the ranks as was traditionally done, and workplaces are becoming increasingly bureaucratized. Thus the bureaucratization of education mirrors the bureaucratization of most sectors of Canadian society, and in turn, the university is changing to provide the new means by which the bourgeoisie maintains control over the Canadian economy.

A11. Austere conditions have further been capitalized upon by university administrations to redirect funding away from the education of students and towards corporate research and infrastructure. In effect, helping stabilize corporate profits in a receding economy by employing public post-secondary institute resources and assets to subsidize research and projects. Notably we have seen the administrators at Dalhousie University, Guelph University, and seemingly the University of Saskatchewan fabricate deficits based upon rhetorical distinctions between particular “academic funding” and the university’s total budget. This has allowed them to deceive students, staff and faculty into accepting highly reactionary and ‘urgently needed’ cuts and help further entrench bureaucratic management models onto the workings of universities. Almost universally, this has negatively affected programs and spaces that have fostered social critique and radical thought, and undermined the quality of educational spaces.

A12. To overcome funding inadequacies, class sizes have grown greatly and the practice is destined to exceed the physical limitations on campuses as online classes increasingly become viable and designed for excessively large amounts of students. This distances those enrolled from their teachers and causes inadequately guided study, as larger classes dissuade critical discussion. For professors, marking a larger number of students has required revolutionizing testing procedures, away from more nuanced and hands-on manners of expressing proficiency and understanding, to highly standardized and mechanized forms, such as standardized testing and online quizzes. This robs students of being able to demonstrate the quality of their knowledge or skills, and often reduces education to a game. This helps foster disengagement from relevant material, and ultimately transforms education into a passive rather than engaged process. This overall process represents the ultimate goal of commodified education, in which the production of the education commodity has become rationalized. The university becomes a factory for producing standardized, low-quality education, a veritable ‘degree-mill’.

A13. Outside of the classroom, lack of funding leads to necessary and practical spaces such as libraries and labs being liquidated or devoted away from students so that their upkeep costs can better be returned to the institution.

A14. Across institutions, the scholarship of academics and students is also taking a hit as research increasingly requires external funding. Many of these come from private sources, so that professors and students have to cater their work to industry at the expense of interesting or socially beneficial work. Though public funding for independent research has previously been accessible, these sources have made major shifts in the last five years to change their priorities. Both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the two of the largest public funding pools for academic research in Canada, in this time have made explicit changes in terms of their representation and mandate to specifically fund research that will promote Canadian business interests. It is also worth pointing out that state-funded scholarships, as well as many of the leading scholarships from charitable foundations, attempt to ideologically guide Canadian scholarship by privileging certain areas of study over others. Currently, resource extraction, aboriginal policy, and public policy are areas that seem to concern the Canadian bourgeoisie.

A15. The internal institutional shift of power away from academics and staff towards a bureaucratic managerial administration has changed the state of academic labour in Universities. This has given rise to new relations with tenuous sessional teaching staff at the mercy of their employers. They are not granted the labour protection of tenure, are poorly paid, and are rarely granted meaning length of terms or job security. This creates a barrier for teachers to develop strong teaching skills due to a lack of exposure, makes it difficult for them to more heavily involve themselves PSE communities, carry out effective research, while the ease of hiring and dismissal means that students are not receiving the quality of education that they could from educators who had gone through more strenuous hiring practices. But most importantly, their lack of security functions as a means of disciplining intellectual labour whereby outspoken or radical academics can be punished for opposing the policies or invested capital interests within their institution.

A16. To further reduce the costs of academic work, increased demands upon faculty is often mitigated by deferring it to undervalued student labour. While many graduate students depend on employment as teaching or research assistants, they are not given a livable wage. This is all despite their full time workload as students as well as restrictions on the amount of work these students are allowed to take on. While universities are looking further to even lesser valued undergraduate students to fulfill duties previously allocated to graduate students, which in appearance puts them at odds with each other especially where undergraduates teaching and research assistants are not members of their local unions. And, in many situations International Students lack the documentation to even allow off-campus work. The result is that foreign graduate students are generally required to be “independently wealthy”, either through money from their class-background, or from scholarships which are ideologically geared towards certain types of “respectable” study.

A17. Often neglected, the non-academic staff are one of the biggest targets of cuts within institutions, with thousands of people losing their jobs on campuses across Canada due to cost saving measures. This has resulted in a lack of support for academic workers and students, by secretaries and other workers, and a lack of upkeep and services. As unions atrophy across Canada, these workers are often unable to fight back against the assault on their working conditions.

A18. Decreases to public funding have progressively motivated the increasing proportion of International Students enrolled in PSE. Many institutions create policies that are presented as a means of increasing cultural diversity and forging international connections amongst students, while the underlying material advantage is that these students tuition is not subject to the same government subsidization and control that Canadian residents receive. As a result, international students are utilized as cash cows and targeted by predatory policies because they are legitimated by the evocation of a xenophobic attitude of otherness that divides them from residents. In turn, the financial restrictions imposed on international students by exorbitant tuition fees generally restricts access to Canadian education to those international students coming from higher class backgrounds.

A19. In another attempt to recoup lost revenue, PSE institutions with campus residences have been investing in the development of housing properties and residences. By this, they can put money towards capital projects that provide tangible returns to the institution, and exploit, for many universities at least, their abundance of land. To increase revenues, institutions have been overturning policies of rent control or price deflation so that costs to their students are increased. In some instances these have been raised to market value, or even higher where institutions are capable of monopolizing on the difficulty that international student might have finding residences.

The Provincial Situation

A20. British Columbian PSE institutions have faced a strong attempt to shift the cost of education directly to students, though in indirect manners. In particular, the administration at UBC increased the financial burden on students by increasing the fees of International Students by 10% and raising the cost of residence housing contracts by 20%. This change in housing costs brought the cost of campus housing to nearly the market value of housing in Vancouver, which currently has the highest property prices of any major city in Canada. The response from the #iamstudent movement must be commended for its ability to mobilize hundreds of students over the issue outside of their student association and acting in solidarity with often overlooked and divided international students.

A21. The Prairies have seen only modest tuition increases. However, there has been more predominant attempts at restructuring and prioritizing money towards corporate investors – predominantly resource extractors. In Saskatchewan, PSE institutions faced modest reductions to funding resulting in massive cost-cutting measures and restructuring. The focus of administration is the dismantling of critical programming and bureaucratic restructuring, both of which entrench the elite nature of these institutions. The University of Alberta has evoked strong responses from staff and students against the concentration of institutional power among their head administrators. While Universities in Manitoba have seen hikes to the tuition fees of their International Students.

A22. PSE students in Ontario continue to both receive the lowest amount of public funding per capita and pay the highest tuition across all of Canada. Due to the great diversity in institutions (urban VS rural, north VS south, etc.) there are a number of different challenges across the province. However, broad issues include: increasing tuition fees, corporatization of education, the elimination of tenure, and bureaucratic restructuring of institutional administrations.

A23. The Quebec government has been handed down a budget that calls for austerity across all sectors. As a result the universities across the province are faced with a funding decrease of $20-40 million dollars, which will be aimed at cuts rather than tuition increases. CEGEPs are threatened by potential privatization. As it stands, the universities are being primarily targeted by the government at this time as their students are seen as less responsive than those from CEGEPs, and this is being done to potentially divide a joint-coalition and mitigate action between students on the streets.

A24. Newfoundland and Labrador has the lowest tuition in the country due to a decade and a half of a tuition freeze. The strong sympathy from bourgeois parties to help maintain this relatively low price is seemingly due to the predominantly working class makeup of the province and the necessity of building an educated work force to develop the nascent resource extraction sector. Despite this, austerity measures have been directed at privatizing adult learning programs and making cuts to education funding.

A25. Nova Scotia has seen strong austerity measures that have motivated their largest university, Dalhousie, to involve itself in an in depth prioritization and restructuring process over the past few years. The government recently deregulated tuition caps so that tuition can “market regulate” and out-of-province students can be targeted for higher fees. Though P-12 schooling is expected to receive an increase of funding, much of this is prefaced on corporate reformed programming, aimed at employing public education as a tool for capital.

A26. PEI has seen large assaults upon primary and secondary school teachers, with over 100 jobs being cut in the last three years. This has occurred alongside consistent cuts to PSE funding and raises to tuition. In 2010 UPEI raised tuition by 3.2%. In 2012 UPEI & Holland College had their funding cut by 3% by the provincial government. In 2013, UPEI laid off 39 employees, most of whom were CUPE members. That year, the cost of tuition was raised by 4%. In 2015, UPEI tuition was raised by 3.1%. So we have seen regular increases in tuition of between 3% and 4%. UPEI’s budget cuts & tuition increases have negatively affected both students and UPEI workers alike. All of this coincides with the construction of a new Sustainable Design Engineering Building. With budget cuts & unrelenting tuition increases, the construction of this new building hardly seems “sustainable”. It appears as though UPEI students are simultaneously paying for this new building and suffering from the effects of dwindling resources & quality of education.

A27. New Brunswick is currently facing intense austerity measures, motivated by an illogical deficit maximum. This will have an astounding impact across all public services as each sector has been informed that they will have to cut about 10% of their budget. This will ring through all levels of education. Notably, the tax rebate for staying in province after graduation from post-secondary is going to be cut, greatly increasing the burden of debt on students.

High Schools

A28. The conditions within high schools across Canada continue to deteriorate due to austerity measures, both due to its effects on education as well as a lack of infrastructure that depends upon cheaper and less inhabitable temporary buildings. This has led to teachers raising issues about excessive class sizes and the lack of attention that can be devoted to each student. This is further problematized as many schools are cutting back on the resources required for special needs students, and placing them into normal programming that is both detrimental to their development and requires more one-on-one attention. This results in more work for teachers at the detriment of the attention and quality that each student receives. Similarly, cutting programs continues to be a way in which schools and school boards save money. As a result, the quality of education degrades quicker for proletarian students, who not only have to rely on public institutions, but who generally do not have extra resources to subsidize their own education.

A29. Outside of the classroom, public schools are being forced to save money by allowing the wages of teachers to stagnate, and streamlining governance of education away from community or municipal school boards to larger and less responsive organizations. Similarly to PSE, school boards are also seeking unsubsidized tuition from international students in order to increase revenue. As a result, we have seen large response from teachers across Canada striking to oppose austerity measures imposed upon them and their classrooms. Granted, teachers often because of their status as an entrenched unionized workforce experience relatively high wages and security among their ranks, potentially placing them as part of the labour aristocracy. This means that the struggles that their interests and the struggles that they engage in may be at odds with those of proletarian students who they teach, and that they themselves may not be subjected to the material conditions that would incite revolutionary tendencies.

A30. Beyond the degradation of high school funding, elementary and secondary education continues to function as an ideological disciplinary tool. It does this to socialize children and youth to subordinate to authority, have externally disciplined work habits, and to fit into a systemic, or industrial ordering. The primary goal of this behaviour management and social control, rather than education itself, often to become workers.

A31. Alternatively, this means of social control forges an alternative route for people that are demonized as problematic within society, creating the general tendency for neglected, struggling or problem students to be on a trajectory towards prison. This process overwhelmingly effects proletarian students, with students from working-class backgrounds identified early-on as being supposedly unintelligent, “problem students”, in need of easier classes, and streamlined towards applied or vocational education streams. Often these students are responding to the degrading quality of education, the dependence on systematic and uncreative forms of education and testing, and usually it is the students who most often need help to overcome these barriers that are designated as problems. With education structured in order to reproduce a loyal working class, it is unsurprising that drop-out rates at all levels are higher for proletarian students.

A32. There is a dramatic and increasingly troubling tendency of schools responding to the problems of “difficult youth” with police intervention resulting in the criminalization of youth. Some schools have begun to use the presence of police as a deterrent, rather than transformative or educational measures. This directly involves students within the criminal system, and puts them into even more marginalizing institutions. For many students caught in the school-to-prison pipeline, the school becomes a repressive state apparatus in-and-of-itself.

A33. Overwhelmingly the determination of problem students falls along racialized lines, whereby prejudices and cultural differences are motivations for othering and disciplining students. An assumption that plays out in both internalizing a position of antagonism within Indigenous or other racialized youth, and educating other students to assume them as problems. This racial dynamic also helps to inform as to why nearly 17% of the prison population in Canada is Indigenous, despite Indigenous people making up roughly 4% of the country’s population, and why a young Aboriginal man in Canada is more likely to enter prison than finish high school. Schools, at all levels, become mechanisms by which white-supremacy is upheld, and capitalism is reinforced. Under capitalism, education is not liberating, nor can it be.

A34. This racialization of the proletariat in schools is extended to immigrant students in Canada, in which undocumented students are denied access within education institutions. Despite the Education Act outlining a right to education for those under 18 regardless of their “immigration status” or that of their parents, this privilege is often denied to undocumented youth. As it is, there is still discrimination within schools, fear of deportation for migrant students, which culminates in the parents of students and their own potential futures in Canada being determined by exploitative working conditions without access to essential services. While undocumented students in high school are still subject to arrests by customs enforcement authorities within their schools, notably in 2006 in Toronto a pair of siblings, 14 and 15, were apprehended while at school and taken to a detention centre for deportation, outlining another form of police presence within schools.

It’s important to note that the state’s surveillance and enforcement of “immigration status” is, in the last instance, a means of managing a reserve army of extremely exploitable labour that can be deported whenever the ruling class finds it convenient to do so. Defining the conditions of membership as it pleases is also a means of managing the labour aristocratic character of the “citizen” working class over and against a racialized non-citizen proletariat from the global south. Through this, denying education to undocumented students is a means of maintaining the cost their labour-power by keeping undocumented communities uneducated and unskilled, as well as preventing them to state services.

First Nations Education

A35. The education of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples within Canada suffers from systemic negligence that disadvantages Indigenous youth from the outset of their public education. Because on-reserve primary and secondary schools are publicly funded by the federal government, rather than the provincial funding received by off-reserve schools, there is a discrepancy between the resources received by on-reserve and off-reserve schools. This amounts to each on-reserve student receiving, on average across Canada, $2000 less than off-reserve counterparts. This lack of funding is further exacerbated by relative detriment to buying power that rural communities have compared to developed municipalities when it comes to buying educational resources. This has negatively affected the performance of First Nations students, who are approximately 20% more likely to not reach provincial standards in education than non-Indigenous students. As a result, nearly half of the Indigenous youth in Canada who live on reserve receive less adequate education, leaving more than 60% of them without a high school equivalent diploma – more than four times the national average. This leaves many First Nations youth less employable and less likely to enter or succeed in PSE. Métis and Inuit students tend to perform more favourably than First Nations students, though still far worse than settler students.

A36. In Canada, Inuits are offered support for PSE while First Nations people are supposed to be offered access to PSE as a treaty right, which is carried out through the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. However, this leaves the over 45% of non-status Indigenous identified people ineligible to attend PSE. Further, with over 26 000 people a year applying to this Post-Secondary Student Support Program, Canada rejects over 5000 people due to a lack of overall funding. Often this leads to a prioritization for funding prospective Indigenous students seeking cheaper programs. This can lead to an overabundance of indigenous students entering programs with poorer economic opportunities, and prevents the development of exceptional Indigenous scholarship.

A37. The corporate nature of universities causes many to have a close relationship with, or even investment in, resource extractors. Universities have historically been tasked with developing the ruling classes of society. In Canada, the bourgeoisie is predominantly white and settler. Also produced by the universities are the lower privileged classes, such as the petty-bourgeois and comprador bourgeois. The university education and connections these classes forge while at school ensures their placement by the Crown as managers of large tracts of stolen land, heads of Crown corporations, and most leading posts within Canadian white-supremacist settler-colonial capitalism. As such, PSE institutions have and continue the development of colonialism within Canada. This places them in contradiction with the liberation of Indigenous people within Canada. Despite this, many education institutions are vouching for increased Indigenous enrolment as a means of developing a reserve army of labour and the Indigenous comprador elements that facilitate resource extraction. Often they recruit Aboriginal youth to work for companies that directly assault Indigenous communities. In many institutions, these companies will even be notified by the school of students with bad or failing marks who then can be targeted for employment on reserves, if they are incapable of succeeding in school.

A38. Beyond these material disadvantages, Indigenous people continue to have to overcome prejudices that infantilize them as dependents and undermine their social value, which has the effect of making it difficult for many of them to socially break into traditionally white educational institutions. One of the primary factors in the reproduction of these prejudices is the lack of Indigenous content within Canadian education, and the continued propagation of ignorance towards Canada’s colonialism.

A39. Due to these barriers to Indigenous people being accepted within PSE, we have seen a rise of Indigenous pedagogical approaches implanted into these institutions that is focused on community engagement in Indigenous urban centres and in rural communities where education is based upon land-based practices. These programs succeed by resisting the colonial logic of inclusion within a Western academy that obviously has no interest in centering Indigenous methodologies, let alone epistemologies. While remedying student’s being separated from their traditional territories or needing to navigate inclusion in European capitalist-colonial institutions that are situated on unceded Indigenous land.

Conclusion

A40. As PSE institutions are shifting back towards being institutions aimed primarily at the ruling class and other privileged classes, proletarian students resist these shifts. As such, PSE becomes a site of class struggle. One of the aspects of this class struggle is the fight to be able to produce subversive knowledge along proletarian lines, which is of use to the revolutionary movement. As universities become increasingly bureaucratized by undemocratic managerial administrations, revolutionary students must organize against their structures with calls for greater democracy. As PSE institutions continue to become centres of capitalist development in research, we must organize against the restricted use of university resources for capital. Insofar as proletarian students are poorly represented in PSE, we must also organize to remove barriers to access to education for proletarian students. In short, while we fight for a series of reforms in the current context of education in Canada, we must smash the bourgeois education system in order for education to become liberating for all. And because education is a means of producing the working class, it is also a place where we can intervene and disrupt that production to create the future anti-capitalist revolutionaries who will overthrow this rotten system once and for all. In order to engage in a proper revolutionary practice, we must have a proper understanding of the contours of the student movement.

B. The Student Movement

The Student Movement in Quebec

B1. The current Quebec student movement was born in the 1960’s. It is a product of this epoch, of the rise of worker and union struggles, of the adaptation of the education system to the then new needs of the capitalist system and of the entry of new petty-bourgeois and proletarian people in PSE (CEGEPs and universities). Students in Quebec decided to base their mode of organisation on the union model (general assemblies, delegates, executive committees), to take the same ideology (combative syndicalism (syndicalisme de combat)) and the same forms of struggle: protests, occupations, strikes.

B2. The Quebec student movement has constituted a pole of politicization for many militants in launching its critique on a large spectre of issues, from the Vietnam war, the liberalization of markets, police repression, and sexism. However, it is on the questions linked to financial accessibility to post-secondary education – tuition and financial aid – that it has organised real mass struggles. From 1968 to 2015, no less than 8 general strikes have been waged on one or the other of those themes, the majority of them having succeeded. Those great movements of struggle have always been organized by a national (Québécois) organisation that federated local associations: the UGEQ in the 60’s, the ANEEQ from the mid-70’s to the 90’s, the MDE in the mid-90’s and from the 2000’s to today, ASSÉ.

B3. Even though the student movement in Quebec has always had a militant tradition which was sometimes very combative and that some extreme-left currents – Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, anarchism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism – have played a more or less important role depending on the epoch, the Quebec student movement of the union type has always articulated its demands as part of capitalist society and has put forward a politics in accordance with social-democracy. This is not surprising considering that the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois youth have always constituted the majority of its social base, particularly in universities.

B4. The Quebec Student Strike in 2012 was a massive mobilization which came about after the Quebec government announced a yearly tuition hike of 1625$ over 5 years. This mobilization was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, mobilization that ever happened in Canada. The campaign was put forth by a campaign in which CLASSE, FECQ and FEUQ participated.

B5. CLASSE (Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante) was a coalition led by ASSÉ, which is the hard core of the student movement, and which basically advocates for greater accessibility to education (including free tuition at all levels of education). They base their principles on combative syndicalism and direct democracy in student associations. The supreme instance of ASSÉ is their congress. In 2012, the militant base of ASSÉ was more or less composed of anarchists and radical social-democrats (the latter being mostly close to Québec Solidaire).

B6. FECQ and FEUQ are mainly lobby groups that claim to represent respectively the CEGEP and university student associations. They are bureaucratic organizations which operate on the principle of representative democracies. They are also well known to try to present themselves as the more “pragmatic” organizations, the ones most eager to dilute the messages of the masses. They are also well known to be the political schools for the Parti Québécois.

B7. The 2012 strike was predominantly led by CLASSE, who had the most leadership in terms of actions and ideas. FECQ and FEUQ didn’t obstruct the actions as much as expected (due to their selling out of the 2005 strike), but they mostly tried to benefit from the cover that CLASSE led. CLASSE called the shots and was able to fully channel the anger of students. However, the FECQ and FEUQ still had most of the striking students in terms of membership numbers, though some FECQ and FEUQ associations had a double membership with CLASSE for the time of the strike.

B8. The government of Quebec attempted to end the strike by threatening to cancel the semester. This argument didn’t convince the students to stop the strike. On the contrary, the arrogance of the government and the successful media representation of the leadership of the CLASSE actually brought more people in the street. Negotiations were held between the CLASSE, FECQ and FEUQ, and the government. At first the government wouldn’t let CLASSE negotiate, but FECQ and FEUQ refused to hold negotiations if their stronger ally-in-the-moment wasn’t there. When the negotiations failed, the movement on the ground was stronger than ever. Economic disruptions were done very effectively and the government started to be afraid.

B9. We must underline that the big workers’ unions (CSN and FTQ) campaigned outright against the student strike by ordering the lower layers of the bureaucracy to not encourage the student strike. This fact will prove essential in understanding the Spring 2015 movement.

B10. The Quebec Liberal Party put forward a special law (Bill 78) putting the students in lock-out for three months, while making it so that the student associations would be held responsible if any blockade of schools happened until proven that they were not involved, and mandating that any march of more than 10 people would have to be declared to the police. This brought massive protests from the population who joined the students to make a popular movement against the repressive actions of the state.

B11. However this movement, being mostly spontaneous, lacked a direction. To kill that movement, the government held elections, in which the PQ was elected by a weak margin as a protest against the arrogance of the previous government. Though the special law was defeated and the tuition hike had been reduced to an indexation, while a large proportion of the students decided they had won the strike, the most radical elements took this as a half-defeat yet were too exhausted to be able to continue the strike.

However, there was something that was changed forever after the strike. More students had been radicalized and introduced to more radical politics, thanks mostly to the anarchist section of CLASSE. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly ordinary folks, knowingly defied Bill 78 and screamed openly that they would break the law (la loi spéciale on s’en calisse).

B11. It was thought that the militants would regain strength after some well-earned vacation (and the time to catch up with their studies!), and that soon after, another offensive would be made by ASSÉ (CLASSE had dissolved after the strike). However, things turned out differently. Quebec Solidaire had gained ground since 2011 and the QS faction in ASSÉ was less restricted than before. The political and ideological leadership came to be more and more social-democratic. It was proposed now 2 years ago that ASSÉ would prepare a campaign to prepare a Spring 2015 strike, however, outright obstruction was done by the QS faction who was the majority faction in the ASSÉ congress. Class struggle politics were abandoned for an arguably more combative reformism than the FECQ and FEUQ, based upon a class collaborative fight for education.

B12. By that time, the Liberals (PLQ) came back to power and started an outright attack against the population in many aspects. This included: cuts to healthcare, education and social welfare with increased daycare tariffs. Many of these cuts were miserly decisions to fuel the economy, while the government promised hundreds of millions in money and electricity subsidies for businesses that will directly go in the pockets of the capitalists.

B13. The anarchist faction (especially from UQAM) decided in 2014 that this was enough, that it was necessary to get out of ASSÉ to organize the next struggle against the government. They called to organize Spring 2015 Committees that were to be a space of solidarity between students and workers, which was lacking in the Student Strike in 2012. The goal of the Spring 2015 movement was to make a common front against the government austerity measures. The modus operandi of the Spring 2015 was overtly to push propaganda in the base of the unions in the public sectors to push their union bureaucracies to vote for illegal strikes. In that time, the student associations would vote to go on strike by the start of Spring. The summit of the strike would be reached on May 1st.

B14. The political leadership was monopolized by a small group that we still call the Invisible Committee (in reference to other French Invisible Committee that has a political line somewhat close to this Invisible Committee). Their ideology, briefly summarized, is based in a total lack of confidence in organisations and in total confidence in affinity groups or literally, groups of friends. The French Invisible Committee calls itself communist, but it should more be classified as anarcho-insurectionnalist. The Invisible Committee was a group of 10ish people from UQAM mostly based around the AFESH (Human Sciences Faculty Student Association). They were also anarchists involved with ASSÉ in 2005 and 2012. The Invisible Committee tried to have a list of political demands for the Spring 2015 movement (for example, the government day care system should be spared from cuts), however the demands were rejected, mostly by some anarchists, on the principle that forcing these political demands on the entire group would be too authoritarian.

B15. As part of the Pan-Canadian Day of Action called for by the MER-RSM, a series of large demonstrations were organized in Montreal and Quebec City on March 24, 2015. Both demonstrations were heavily repressed; in Quebec City militants were shot with “non-lethal” weaponry at close-range. The night demonstration in Montreal, which numbered 10 000 people, was heavily repressed by the police but managed to continue after initial confrontations were won by protests. One of our militants was sent to hospital as a result of injuries sustained in the march.

B16. The protests that came after the Pan-Canadian Day of Action were less and less successful with time. Less people came: casualties and fear of casualties being a major deterrent. Nevertheless, specific protests that were particularly worthy of mention were the feminist protests and the May 1st protest organized by CLAC (Convergence des Luttes Anti-Capitalistes; Anti-Capitalist Convergence). Two big feminist protests were held. The second protest faced especially heavy police repression. The May 1st protest organized by CLAC was overall a very big success. Some CEGEPs teachers unions decided to go on an illegal strike on May 1st. Though participation for this was less than expected, it was still an action that had not been seen for decades.

B17. Most of the student strikes were over two weeks after they started in the beginning of the spring. Only the student associations with the most entrenched militant culture, mainly in UQAM, were on strike after that. The police and administrative repression endured there was terrible.

B18. ASSÉ’s implication in the struggle against the government was dismal. At every step, the ASSÉ executive only entered the conflict because they were pressured by the student associations, and when they did enter the conflict, they tried to obstruct the deployment of the forces by systematically calling for a retreat. ASSÉ did its 2nd of April annual march but had called for an end to the strike in order to prepare for a strike on Fall 2015 with the help of the union bureaucracy. However, the bad faith of the union bureaucracy was well known at the moment, and the logistical concern of mobilizing a popular conflict with an incoming winter proved unpopular. Spring 2015 sent an incendiary pamphlet called L’ASSÉ ne fait pas le printemps (ASSÉ Doesn’t Make the Spring) which directly denounced the executive of ASSÉ. After having rocks thrown at them by participants in their own protest, the ASSÉ executive resigned. However, for the ASSÉ cadres who were close to Printemps 2015, it was not enough. The ASSÉ executive was impeached after having already resigned.

B19. For the MER-RSM, it was easy to work with the Invisible Committee, far easier than it would have been to work inside ASSÉ. The fact that the MER-RSM is, by definition, anti-capitalist and revolutionary led to some sympathy in the Invisible Committee. The Spring 2015 Committees were totally unstructured, which meant that anybody could start a committee and attach themselves to the movement. Applying the mass line, MER-Montréal started a daycare project, where the meetings and events of Spring 2015 would have a daycare to allow parents to involve themselves in politics. This was meant to answer to a feminist critique of activism in general and also a way to bring in new and more resilient elements to the struggle. The daycare committee was the last one to function and still functions on demand. We have to note that even though most of the members of the MER-Montréal had an anarchist past and were thus raised in feminist politics by anarchists, no men outside the MER-RSM came on the daycare project.

B20. The strike, however, was not as successful as some had hoped. It was very difficult to mobilize students on such propositions as the end of austerity and the end of extractivism. Those propositions were vague, and left no opportunity for a small victory. All had to be won or lost. The most eager students were disrespectful with the masses who sometimes had legitimate concerns about the possibility of success of this fight. After all, strikes are expensive, especially for proletarian students and those with children. Virtually no support structures were prepared for them. What killed the Spring 2015 movement was left-opportunism. This problem wasn’t understood by us before the strike had peaked.

B21. Under these circumstances, it was therefore impossible to make a mass movement with any direction except being against something the most vaguely possible or to produce any discourse or arguments. It is also impossible to fight the various oppressions inside the movement. It is thus finally impossible to bring new people in the struggle. Those are the dangers of left-opportunism, that were present in the Spring 2015 movement.

The Student Movement in the Rest of Canada

B22. The student movement in Quebec has a unique and more developed history than the student movement in the rest of Canada. As such, it is worthwhile to examine these two processes separately.

B23. The Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) is the main student organization in English Canada. It is a lobby group that fronts as a national coordinating body of student unions. It seeks to unite student unions across Canada, offer services to its membership and protect students’ rights. It arose at a time when the campus left in English Canada was desperate for organization. The CFS was founded in 1981 by a grouping of 61 student unions and has since grown to be the largest mainstream student organization in English Canada representing approximately 500,000 students, of which the majority are not even aware of the existence of the CFS. It is made up of a national organization, composed of numerous provincial organizations (such as CFS-Ontario, CFS-BC, etc.).

B24. Since 1981 the CFS has claimed to be at the forefront of the student movement in English Canada, and yet have very little to show for it. The CFS’s main political drive is against tuition fees, either through fee eliminations, reductions, or increase freezes. The CFS also takes on secondary campaigns such as the “No to Anti-Semitism, No to Islamophobia” campaign, the “No Means No!” campaign, and others. While there is nothing objectionable on the surface of many of the CFS’s campaigns, they do not go far enough, and their methods (predominately lobbying and maintaining bureaucratic control of student unions) are totally inimical to struggle. As noted in the first section, the situation of education in Canada is dire, and only getting worse. The CFS has been unable to answer the challenge history has presented to it, largely due to its reformist political approach and bureaucratic methods of leadership.

B25. The RSM holds that there are limits to the current student movement; these limits are best observed in the CFS’s incorrect assessment of the current conditions in Canada and in the CFS’s failed practice.

B26. First, the CFS lacks a class analysis of the education system in Canada. Therefore, being unable to scientifically and accurately assess the class basis and interests of their own membership, the CFS insists that students are a homogenous group. Because of this failure to recognize the multi-class character of students, the CFS constantly has to renegotiate its politics to accommodate the will of proletarian and bourgeois students. However, since bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and middle class students make up an overwhelming majority in Canadian universities, their interests tend to win out.

B26. Thus, the CFS is forced into a difficult situation. Like all social-democratic groupings (unions, parties, etc.) the structural role of the CFS is to front left in order to reign-in potential revolutionaries. As such, the CFS fronts radical to varying degrees when convenient. However, because the majority of the CFS’s membership is not proletarian, there exists no objective basis for even social-democratic politics within their organization. Thus the CFS leadership is forced to simultaneously moderate its political approach, and resort to bureaucratic and anti-democratic measures to maintain control of the organization. Ironically, this leads to the CFS’s influence among its members decreasing, undermining the necessity of controlling the organization in the first place.

B27. Second, the CFS also has an incorrect conception of the role of the government and school administrations. Instead of understanding governments and administrations as apparatuses of the bourgeois state, they think that achieving the CFS’s policy goals is simply a matter of making cogent arguments to the party or individual in power at a given time. The CFS does not understand that proletarian students have divergent interests with the Canadian state and university administrations, and thus need to adopt a confrontational approach to ensure their interests are met. This misconception on the role of the state is why the CFS focuses so intensely on lobbying the government.

B28. Their third failure of conception and assessment is their misunderstanding of the trade-union movement. The CFS sees the trade-union movement as a resounding success in Canada. Their approach which mirrors that of the big unions is based upon the belief that the existence of unions is a victory in and of itself. They also see unions as de facto lobby groups (whether they are lobbying to an employer or the government), rather than as organizations for exercising the political power of workers. The CFS thus emulates the worst aspects of the trade union movement.

B29. The ideological underpinnings that the CFS bases its practice on, summed up in the points above, dictates the type of practical work engaged in by the CFS. The CFS’s main political work is lobbying, which generally happens during “lobby week”, and to which all other efforts are subordinate to. Lobby week is supposed to be a time for student representatives to sit down with members of parliament and government officials, express concerns about the education system, and hopefully convince politicians to make positive changes for students. While on the surface this is an ineffective approach, the CFS is not even able to engage in an earnest and honest social-democratic practice. What actually happens during lobby week is a series of meetings where empty promises are made, and young student leaders have a chance to make an impression on the Canadian political elite in hopes of impressing the right person and one day going to work as a party staffer or in a government agency. Lobby week winds up being more about the personal career advancement of the CFS representatives (and the reproduction of the ruling class!) than about actually lobbying for the interests of students; it is a mockery of itself. Lobby week is a prime example of the fact that not only is lobbying an empty process but that the CFS leadership lacks both the means and the will to go beyond attempting to stave off the effects of capitalism on campuses.

B30. The CFS is currently crumbling. Many locals have attempted to defederate from the CFS, a problem that the CFS regularly combats by taking their locals to court, and sometimes even bankrupting their locals with legal fees. Indeed, in the past 10 years, the CFS has passed resolution after resolution aiming to make it more difficult to defederate from the CFS, contravening basic democratic principles. However, some locals have been successful at disaffiliating. The CFS response to these democratic processes proves that the CFS leadership holds a flagrant disregard for internal democracy. Defederation attempts will likely become more and more frequent as the contradictions between proletarian and bourgeois students intensify, tuition fees skyrocket, and the CFS fails to listen to its membership and keep up with the times. In 2009 Maclean’s Magazine reported that as many as 13 student associations were holding votes to defederate from the CFS. Ultimately, these defederations, though sometimes orchestrated by right wing forces, are the fault of the CFS and the CFS alone. While we understand why students want to defederate from the CFS, we feel that this is a largely ineffective tactic, insofar as the majority of the CFS’s membership does not even know about the CFS’s existence. Defederation is good; building combative anti-capitalist revolutionary student organizations is better.

B31. Given the limitations of the CFS’s approach to political work, it has been unable to copy the organizational forms of the Quebec student movement and bring them to the rest of Canada. In 2012 there were minor solidarity actions organized with the Maple Spring by the CFS, though they were entirely toothless. The CFS leadership did not seriously contemplate organizing towards a strike in English Canada. In 2015, the CFS was completely silent about the Spring 2015 movement. Increasingly, as the CFS is forced to moderate itself further to appease bourgeois student interests, even the veneer of progressivism fades.

B32. The CFS is not a possible avenue for advancing the anti-capitalist and revolutionary movement on campuses. At best, the structures of the CFS are firmly entrenched in bourgeois forms of representation, making it impossible to use them for anti-capitalist or revolutionary ends. The CFS is also a registered corporation, meaning that its assets can be seized if it engages in any sort of illegal activity (strikes, etc.). This structural limitation necessarily excludes any politics that veer away from maintaining the status quo. This is why we often find many individuals within the CFS professing to be communists, anarchists, or some other form of leftist who are forced to curtail their own politics to hold positions in the institution. At worst, the CFS abandons any pretenses to democracy, and cracks down –through legal or bureaucratic measures- against any internal dissent.

B33. Currently the only institutionalized alternative to the CFS is The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA). CASA was founded in 1995. CASA’s is linked to student union alliances such as Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) which is an affiliated organization of some CASA locals. While CASA organizationally is quite similar to the CFS, it is more liberal in its political orientation, often parroting the federal or local provincial Liberal Party’s educational policy. As contradictions tighten and more student unions pull out of the CFS, those without a strong revolutionary left presence may very well be absorbed by CASA. Arguably, CASA was founded in reaction to the CFS and its efforts to lobby the government in favour of education changes. This being said there is very little fundamental difference between the CFS and CASA aside from the front-end politics and the fact that the CFS has been more successful in acquiring a seat at the ruling-class table due to its size. Revolutionaries should oppose the CFS, CASA and their affiliated organizations.

Independent Student Organizations

B34. The Young Communist League (YCL) was founded in 1922 and is closely connected to the Communist Party of Canada. After disappearing during the Cold War, the current incarnation of the YCL was reconstituted in 2004. Their work in recent years has been comprised of: work on CFS campaigns, youth conferences, running candidates in student union elections, campaign for a charter of youth rights, and participation in the Che Guevara Volunteer Work Brigade in Cuba. Geographically, the YCL appears to be confined to BC, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.

B35. The YCL recognizes that the student movement is a multi-class movement. However, instead of aligning with proletarian elements in that movement, it commits the same mistake as the CFS, and attempts to organize all students as students, and more broadly, all youth as youth. The YCL sees the student movement as a “democratic” movement, and thinks it would be “disastrous” to extend class struggle politics to the student milieu. Because of this mistaken conception, the YCL aligns itself with the CFS, which it sees as a mass organization, arguing that “unity” within the student movement is more important than politics.

B36. The YCL’s focus on the CFS has led to the increasing irrelevance of the organization in recent years. The YCL has adopted a style of work reminiscent of the ultra-bureaucratic methods of CFS organizers. It has oriented its recruitment efforts towards CFS and student union bureaucrats. In running candidates for student union elections under broadly “progressive” pro-CFS slates, the YCL has been forced to convey a certain level of bourgeois respectability which has alienated them from potential new recruits. Here we can think of Zidane Mohamed (elected YCL central organizer in 2014) whose anti-police comments were dredged up by the media during the 2015 Ryerson Student Union elections. Zidane later retracted the comments condemning all forms of violence against innocent people, lapsing into liberalism to maintain a particular public image.

B37. The YCL advocates that young workers get involved in their union locals while ignoring the reality that the majority of proletarian youth are working precarious un-unionized positions. Furthermore, much like their focus on the CFS, they are not critical of the current labour movement in Canada; they have no program for pushing for revolutionary politics or waging class struggle within existing unions. In practice, this means they are asking young workers and students to back institutions that are not struggling for them or in their interests.

B38. The International Socialists (IS) are a Trotskyist organization. While they were quite large and pervasive during the hey-day of the anti-globalization movement, in recent years their influence has retracted significantly, confined now to only Toronto and Vancouver. This is largely due to their undefined and liberal politics; they had a large membership turnover, that was only further complicated when the NDP became the official opposition. The IS used to run student groups on various campuses as student wings of their party-organization. They had no real practice aside from tailing student union initiatives, and the CFS. As a result, with the collapse of the IS across Canada, and the weakness of the IS’s political line, the student sections of the IS have also all-but disappeared.

B39. Fightback is another Trotskyist organization. It is renowned for its entryist practice. There are multiple levels to this approach; on the surface, it argues that the NDP will be where most workers turn in a time of crisis, and as such, revolutionaries should be present within the NDP. Underneath this justification is an understanding that the NDP will not be able to shift to the left, and so will split during a time of crisis, with Fightback hopefully taking a substantial section of the NDP’s membership with it. Fightback has had very little intervention into the student movement. In Toronto they organized the Toronto Young New Democrats (a city-wide rather than riding-based organization), which allowed them to seize control of the Ontario Young New Democrats, from which they were promptly expelled. Fightback also entered the YCL in Toronto, and using dishonest tactics, destroyed that organization. Fightback’s approach is fundamentally limited by a misunderstanding of the state and illusions in social democracy, as well as an incredibly dishonest practice.

Conclusion

B40. The Revolutionary Student Movement emerged in a context of stagnation and institutionalization of a large amount of the left in Canada. Based on our experience as organizers, we rejected the mistakes of the existing student movement, and attempted to chart a new path. We internalized the successes –notably the Maple Spring of 2012- while maintaining a critical distance. Most importantly, we sought to extend class struggle politics to campuses, as a means of consciously strengthening the emergent revolutionary movement across Canada and Quebec. Very quickly our politics moved beyond rejection and critique; the next section is an evaluation of our short history, as a means of moving forward.

C. The Work of the Revolutionary Student Movement

The First Conference and the Idea of the MER-RSM

C1. Three years ago, in December 2012, the First Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students, initiated by the PCR-RCP, brought together anti-capitalist student organizers from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City. Inspired by the Maple Spring, the goal of the conference was for the student organizations to come together and share perspectives and experiences. Some of the organizations, like the RSM Toronto, were new, whereas others, like the Marxist Students Association at the University of Ottawa, had existed for some time.

C2. At this time, while there was certainly talk of forming a defined organization, there was no movement towards consolidation. The conference was preceded by the release of Seize the Time! Blaze a Revolutionary Path!, a document which built on the experience of the 2012 Quebec Student Strike and set forward a more scientific analysis of the student milieu and the student movement. The analysis contained therein suggested that students were not an abstract group in and of itself, but rather were cleaved into social classes with contradicting interests. This document would go on to form the core political approach of what would become the RSM.

C3. The conference produced little in terms of immediate results. Broadly, in place of reformist politics, conference participants agreed to carry out open and independent anti-capitalist work on all campuses in order to unite newly radicalized students, as opposed to the approaches of the establishment left. This work was to be carried out amongst working class students and connected with the goals of the proletariat in general, rather than around “student interests”. The conference also agreed to hold a second conference, and elected a “Conference Committee”, to oversee the planning of the next conference.

C4. The first conference proved fruitful for the comrades from Ontario, and allowed them to correct their approach to work. The experience of the Maple Spring underlined the necessity of reaching out to the masses. Shortly after the first conference, the Marxist Students Association at uOttawa launched their General Assemblies Campaign, and the RSM at the University of Toronto launched their initiative to save the Transitional Year Program.

The General Assembly Campaign at uOttawa

C5. Coming out of the 2012 Quebec Student Strike, one of the most inspiring and notable facets of the months-long struggle was the culture of direct democracy through general assemblies. These general assemblies saw hundreds of thousands of students come together in order to democratically govern their student unions; something that the RSM saw was sorely lacking within English Canada.

C6. In February of 2013 a campaign was launched by the uOttawa chapter of the RSM to make General Assemblies the highest decision making body of the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO). The uOttawa RSM (then known still as the Marxist Students Association) was able to make this political demand a reality during the 2013-2014 school year after a second referendum and months of hard campaigning. This represented not only a historic success for comrades at uOttawa, but also a successful example of the practice of the pan-Canadian RSM and a victory for working class students fighting for a voice on campuses across English Canada.

C7. The GA campaign is of particular importance to the history of the RSM for a number of reasons.

First, it was a campaign where the method of the mass line was proven an effective tool on campuses.

Second, it proved that class struggle not only happens on campus but that communists can successfully integrate with working class students by putting forward demands that benefit them- in essence it disproved the long peddled myth that students are a homogenous group with similar interests.

Third, it forced the RSM to break with the bureaucratic and social-democratic student movement, who attempted to hold back these types of structures in favour of bureaucratic and reformist methods of organizing students. It also forced the student bureaucrats to expose themselves as undemocratic in the eyes of the student body as a whole.

C8. Aside from these important lessons the chapter at uOttawa also saw a spike in membership and gained a reputation of being a group that isn’t afraid to engage in hard work, a reputation that had a ripple effect into the rest of the pan-Canadian organization. No longer was the RSM simply a fringe group or another leftist sect- the RSM had proven itself in action.

C9. In many ways the GA campaign laid much of the ground work (especially in Ontario) for the logistical and political planning of March 24 Day of Action. Locally it also opened up the possibility for the uOttawa chapter to put forward a strike motion at the GA. Unfortunately this motion has not been taken up yet due to the GAs not making quorum and direct interference from CFS backed executives in the SFUO.

C10. While the GAs have yet to be successful, we remain optimistic. Ultimately what we was achieved with GAs at uOttawa is not a perfect solution to the problems of the mainstream student movement in English Canada, but rather we built a space in which agitation and class struggle can take place. This can only be a positive thing for the RSM and other left groups hoping to change the course of the struggle on campuses- it’s now up to us to continue to win GAs on other campuses, be leaders within those spaces and through this, form a strong revolutionary culture among working-class students.

The Second, Third, and Fourth Conferences and the Consolidation of the RSM

C11. The Second Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students was held in June, 2013 in Ottawa. It brought together a wider variety of anti-capitalist organizers from across Canada who had been consolidated around the perspectives outlined at the first congress. This included comrades from Saskatoon, Kamloops, as well as a number of locations across Ontario and Quebec.

C12. The Ottawa conference made explicit the now nascent RSM’s desire to expand itself. Particular emphasis was placed on the West Coast, where the RSM at this time had no presence. It also helped consolidate the RSM’s political approach (as seen in the conference resolutions), which has carried through to this day. The second conference was the first to insist on some sort of standardized structure among conference participants, insofar as it mandated each “section” (loosely) to appoint someone responsible for maintaining contact with the broader RSM.

C13. Following the second conference, a concerted outreach strategy began. A speaking tour was conducted, somewhat unsuccessfully, across Ontario and Quebec. The RSM also sent organizers to BC where they were successful in launching a Vancouver section of the RSM.

C14. Between the second and third conference, the conference committee, building on the successes of the organization and its now expanded presence, issued a call for the creation of a defined organization. The conference committee called on all participants to submit motions outlining what would be necessary to create a real anti-capitalist student movement, rather than just a paper organization. It was this perspective –towards organizational consolidation- that influenced the Third Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students.

C15. The Third Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students was held in Montreal in February of 2014. In addition to the existing sections, the conference was attended by new contacts from Vancouver, Kamloops, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Guelph. The Young Communist League also sent observers, who were generally disruptive, sectarian, and unhelpful during the conference.

C16. Participants at the conference discussed the necessary points that needed to be met in order to form a real pan-Canadian organization. They agreed that there needed to be some sort of activity in all major regions of the country for the RSM to truly be a pan-Canadian organization. They voted to form a committee tasked with preparing a draft constitution. The RSM was to create a basic study guide for its sections. The third conference also saw the creation of the Coordinating Committee, which was to not just prepare the next conference, but rather was to be the leading body of the organization. Last, in the spirit of unity the RSM sought to enter a series of debates on the role of revolutionaries in the student movement with the YCL; the YCL has yet to agree to this process. The participants endeavoured to meet again before the end of 2014 to evaluate the work of the RSM.

C17. In the summer of 2014 the main goal –that of Canada-wide activity- was fulfilled with the first RSM events taking place in Eastern Canada, Halifax specifically. In addition the RSM was now active across Ontario and Quebec, had a section in Vancouver, and had rallied some contacts (Saskatoon and Winnipeg) on the prairies. The reality of a pan-Canadian RSM was coming to fruition.

C18. The Fourth Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students was held in Quebec City in November of 2014. While the RSM was at this point the largest left-wing student organization in Canada, our section in Vancouver had unfortunately liquidated itself due to mistaken conceptions of the possibility of organizing among students. Despite this, the participants at the conference decided to forge ahead and formally declare the formation of the pan-Canadian RSM. A constitution was adopted, and a plan of action for the following year was agreed upon. Specifically, the RSM endeavoured to support the Spring 2015 movement, and plan a day of action across Canada in solidarity with the anti-austerity struggle in Quebec. In many ways, the adoption of the constitution and the formal declaration of the RSM was a watershed moment for the process that had begun two years earlier in Toronto.

C19. The first four conferences of the RSM –the process by which the RSM moved from being an approach to being an organization – represents a single period in the history of the RSM. During this period the organization consolidated its political perspectives, tested them through engaging in mass work, and expanded its presence. While the process was largely a success –the numbers speak for themselves – it was not an unmitigated success. The RSM had difficulty developing new leadership and cementing our political perspectives across some chapters, which ultimately resulted in the loss of our section in Winnipeg. Though we abstractly maintained an anti-colonial position, we still have difficulty in building lasting links with indigenous students. RSM sections also began to face difficulties as older leaders moved out of the student milieu, with new leaders struggling to fill their shoes. The Infoprop committee, which had been created at many of the conferences, never fulfilled its mandate. Despite these difficulties, we consider the process of our formation to have been successful, with minor self-criticisms noted.

C20. With the structure of the pan-Canadian RSM formalized, the RSM set about the undertake its first major cross-Canada action – the March 24th pan-Canadian Day of Action, in solidarity with the 2015 Quebec Student Strike. The conference called on RSM organizers in Quebec to join in with the mobilization committees, and for such committees to be created throughout English Canada in solidarity with the student strike. This coordinated cross-Canada action, which was hitherto the most complex action the MER-RSM had taken upon itself, would not have been possible without the struggle-unity process that had occurred through all four of the conferences. The methods of work, political lines and working bodies of the MER-RSM that had been established through the first four conferences were all a necessary precondition for the development of a range of disparate anti-capitalist student clubs into a truly pan-Canadian Revolutionary Student Movement.

The March 24th Day of Action

C21. The Fourth Conference also passed a resolution for a pan-Canadian Day of Action across English Canada. RSM chapters were to establish mobilization committees on their campuses to campaign around a series of demands that had been decided on by the RSM Coordinating Committee. The mobilization committees were to organize students for a day of action on March 24th, with the specifics of that action being up to the committee’s preference. These committees would provide MER-RSM members the opportunity to struggle alongside a broader section of the student base. In the process of struggle, the hope was that the mobilization committees would pull people closer to the RSM ideologically and organizationally.

C22. In Quebec, the March 24th Day of Action saw an incredible turnout. Montreal organized 10 000 participants into a march led by the Revolutionary Communist Party, and Quebec City saw a turnout of 350-450 people.

C23. English Canada saw a good turnout to some the actions and a more moderate turnout for others. The Saskatoon Socialist Students Association pulled 250 people into the March 24th Day of Action. However, RSM uOttawa, originally aiming for a student strike, held a demonstration of only around 35 people. The action in Toronto brought together all Toronto campus chapters into one small flying squad action at York University with a number of around 12 people. In total, actions were carried out in 16 cities across Canada.

C24. RSM consistently encountered wrecking behaviour on the part of the CFS across English chapters leading up to March 24th. In Winnipeg, the CFS privately discouraged other student organizations from participating in the March 24th Day of Action. In Halifax, the CFS tried to hijack the mobilization committee’s efforts and strangle militant action by discouraging occupation of the President’s office, and by demanding the Maritime Anarchist Initiative sign onto various CFS initiatives. Elsewhere, the CFS ignored the mobilization committees, such as in UTSC, York, Ottawa and Algonquin.

C25. We consider the March 24th Day of Action to have been a success with room for improvement. In total, we mobilized over 11 000 students across Canada. We were able to mobilize around a consistent set of demands, with coordinated propaganda across all sections. The Day of Action provided a relaunch platform for our section in Montreal, and spread the reputation of the RSM even further than before. However, disorganization and a failure to actualize the mass line resulted in poor mobilizations of some sections. And in Toronto, Toronto-centrism resulted in a lack of importance put on the Day of Action as opposed to local events. There is much room for improvement for our next coordinated action.

The CUPE 3902/3903 Academic Workers’ Strike

C24. Simultaneously with the Spring 2015 movement, a bitter strike among education workers developed in Toronto. In the months leading up to the strike at U of T, no one, including no one in the RSM, believed that the membership of CUPE 3902 (teaching assistants at the University of Toronto) would reject the tentative agreement reached by the bargaining team in February. While the local had been able to secure a very high strike vote going into bargaining, the CUPE 3902 executive had thoroughly undermined any genuine pro-strike sentiment and had no plans for a possible strike. When CUPE 3902 membership voted to reject the tentative agreement reached by the bargaining team, members of the RSM, and the campus left in general, were caught by complete surprise.

C25. At this point in late February and early March, CUPE 3902 was alone in the strike. The executive had, in typical capitulationist fashion, completely forgone any preparation for an actual strike during bargaining, and thus CUPE 3902 was sorely unprepared and disorganized in every way possible going into the strike.

C26. The RSM at U of T was quite small. The RSM issued a letter of support of the strike, and denounced the executives who at this time were well known traitors. The RSM, rather than haphazardly sending out members onto the picket lines with little to no plan in mind, was slow to enter into the strike, and instead continued carrying on its usual work towards the March 24th Day of Action.

C27. After one week of the strike at the University of Toronto, CUPE 3903 (education workers at York University), voted to go on strike. CUPE 3903 was also plagued with a collaborationist leadership, largely composed of members of the International Socialists, who did everything they could to run the strike into the ground. In lieu of two poor strike leaderships, the RSM (including RSM York, now entering into the fray) met with radicalized members of CUPE 3902 and 3903, as well as the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee (PRAC) in early March in order to draft a coordinated plan for support of the strike. At this meeting, people voted to found the Joint Strike Committee (which later became the Education Workers Action Committee). The RSM’s role in this coordinated plan of action was to organize undergraduates and non-member students to support the picket lines.

C28. At UofT Scarborough, these strike support actions were crucial to introducing both undergrad students and strikers to the RSM. Strike support proved useful in helping pull attention to the mobilization committee, and the mobilization committee served as a useful operating base for undergraduate strike support. The RSM was able to gain membership during this struggle.

C29. At UofT St. George campus, efforts by the RSM to organize undergraduate students gave way to focus by RSM organizers on organizing on the picket lines for the Joint Strike Committee. Continued efforts at organizing the March 24th Day of Action gathered no attention, and several events catered towards the strike were not well attended. Most of the remaining RSM member’s work was for the Joint Strike Committee. While the Joint Strike Committee would be very successful during the strike, the RSM St. George collapsed during this period.

C30. The RSM at York was able to gain membership and form connections with other progressive student groups on campus, including the York United Black Students Alliance.

C31. The strike support efforts ultimately culminated with the decision by the Joint Strike Committee to hold a “long march” from York to UofT in support of both strikes. Both the leaderships of CUPE 3902 and 3903 did everything they could to quash the effort, but ultimately failed. In a last desperate move, the leadership of CUPE 3902 advised their members to agree to arbitration, which ultimately passed. Despite this, the long march went ahead and gathered around 1000 people on March 25th, 2015. The following week the York administration agreed to the demands of the strikers, and the strike was over. The long march, organized by the Joint Strike Committee, played an important role in winning the strike.

C32. Following the strikes, the collaborationist leadership of CUPE 3903 was defeated, and an anti-capitalist slate (with members of the Joint Strike Committee included) was brought to power.

C33. Why then, despite the success of the strike at York, and the modest success of the RSM sections at York and UofT Scarborough campus, did the RSM St. George collapse? The RSM at UofT St George campus largely put all its efforts behind building the Joint Strike Committee, and both RSM St. George and the Joint Strike Committee fell into total inactivity after the strike. The RSM was unable to consolidate politically any of the contacts made during the strike, or demonstrate why an organization like the RSM was useful or necessary. This demonstrates the danger of “ambulance chasing”; the RSM liquidated itself into a movementist practice, and so fell apart when the movement was over.

Conclusion

C34. In the aftermath of the March 24th Day of Action, the RSM again rapidly expanded. We were joined by comrades in Woodstock NB, Fredericton, Hamilton, St. Catharines, PEI, and a renewed section in Vancouver. As of September 2015, we have 20 sections either currently existing or in formation. We are active in every major region of the country, and we are unquestionably the largest and most wide-spread revolutionary mass organization in Canada.

C35. Our expansion has been largely due to our political perspectives, and our willingness to fight. We were present in leading roles in both of the major student/education sector conflagrations of 2015, indicating the relevancy of our politics. We have experienced organizers, many coming from the social-democratic student movement, that bring with them a wealth of experiences.

C36. Despite our successes, we have much work to do. While our pan-Canadian organization is strong, many of our sections are weak. The first generation of leadership –those that built the RSM- will have left the organization as of the fifth congress. We have to broaden and deepen our political perspectives, and build concrete links with more sections of the masses. We need to actualize a revolutionary politics that speaks to the needs of proletarian students across Canada. Our political approach, and our willingness to fight will allow us to rise and meet the challenges presented to us. We will continue to train communist organizers, and organize working class students in the interests of our entire class and the revolutionary movement. We have a world to win; let’s get to it.RSM Coordinating Committee, December 2015

Be it further resolved that we make the next year a year of consolidation and building roots;

Be it further resolved that each section makes recruitment its primary focus;

Be it further resolved that for effective recruitment, each section must focus on outreach, including frequent postering, leafleting, tabling, and event holding, with the goal that everyone on our respective campuses knows that we exist;

Be it further resolved that for retention of new members, weekly meetings, at the same time and location, be held by each section;

Be it further resolved that the political development of new members, through study groups, become a priority;

Be it further resolved that each section take on a small mass campaign specific to their location, as a means of concretizing work, proving the relevancy of anti-capitalist politics, winning small victories, and staying connected with the masses.

2. Tranformative Justice Committee

The MER-RSM will strike an open Transformative Justice Committee

Be it resolved that the Coordinating Committee organize a first meeting of this committee and oversee the completion of its task

Be it further resolved that this committee be tasked with investigating the accumulated experience of the RSM and of other organizations in handling sexual assaults, and all other forms of oppression as outlined in the preamble. This committee will create a praxis guide for local RSM chapters as well as the pan-Canadian organization.

Be it further resolved that this committee work with the Proletarian Feminist Front on the committee’s mandate.

Be it further resolved that this committee contact any groups with relevant experience to their mandate.

Be it further resolved that this committee submit a proposal of a praxis guide to all members at least two weeks prior to next Congress.

Be it further resolved that this committee present a follow-up of their work at the next Congress.

Be it further resolved that the Transformative Justice Committee produce a guide on how to appropriately carry out two-line struggle that is to be completed at least two weeks prior to the next Pan-Canadian MER-RSM congress and to be distributed among its members and shared publicly.

3. On Propaganda

The MER-RSM will create it’s own journal/publication, and will have the first issue ready for next year’s congress.

4. Cadre Training

The Coordinating Committee of the Pan-Canadian MER-RSM is responsible for organizing a speaking tour this upcoming summer of 2016 to share information and practical understandings of our work to its membership and sympathizers, to build our own capabilities and to consolidate the social unity of the organization.

Be it resolved that this speaking tour will travel through the concentrated areas of the MER-RSM, Ontario and Quebec, but that secondary speaking tours or technologically supported events should be encouraged in other parts of Canada.

Be it further resolved that these events be cohosted by local members of each respective chapter to help develop upcoming leadership.

5. I Am A Student

The MER-RSM will support the I Am A Student movement by drafting a letter that will be signed by each of its local chapters.

6. Coordinating committee loss of members

The Coordinating Committee will be given the ability to co-opt members onto the committee if the need arises. If the need does arise, any instances of this occurring need to be approved by the following congress.

7. Fundraisers

The Coordination Committee be tasked with creating guidelines for fundraising and using the funds raised. Guidelines should be produced and sent to sections before the start of 2016 winter semester.

Be it resolved that Chapters that have the capacity and/or need for funds should aim to hold at least one fundraiser every semester.

Be it further resolved that all sections receiving institutional funding centralize at least 10% of this funding to the Pan-Canadian MER-RSM.

This section of the workshop is titled “The Mass Line and Student Organizing”. As the name implies, I’m going to be talking about the relevance of the mass line to work that we do among students, based in the strong class analysis advanced by my comrade beforehand. First I’ll talk a bit about myself to give you an idea of where I’m coming from, and then I’ll talk about the mass line in the abstract, the concrete application of the mass line in our work, why the mass line is important, and finally I’ll draw some conclusions about the mass line’s role in student organizing.

So a bit about me. I’m an organizer with the Revolutionary Student Movement; I currently sit on the coordinating committee of the RSM. I’ve been doing student organizing at various levels since 2007 when I started doing anti-military recruitment work at my high school in London, Ontario. I was very involved with my student union at uOttawa, even sitting on the council at one point. I was initially very supportive of the bureaucratic student unions, but my experiences and disillusionment with that approach to organizing led me to help found the Revolutionary Student Movement. I’ve also done some union organizing with food service workers, working as an in-shop organizer in the industrial cafeteria at Carleton University. All this is to say, what I’m talking about today isn’t borne out of abstract principles or simply from reading interesting articles, but instead is an attempt by me to pick out and synthesize some universal lessons from the work that I’ve spent the last 7 years doing.

II. What is the Mass Line?

What do I mean when I say “the mass line”? The mass line is the communist method of doing work among the masses; all successful communist organizers use it, but it was first synthesized by Mao. Communists aren’t the only ones who use the mass line; I’d go as far as saying it’s a necessary method of work to employ when doing any sort of political organizing, but communists are generally the only ones that conceptualize it in these terms. It is a radically democratic method of doing work, when applied correctly.

And who are the masses we’re talking about when we talk about the mass line? Well, quite frankly, everyone with the exception of the ruling class – in capitalist society capitalists and their stooges. The masses are people with all sorts of ideas and political consciousnesses, good and bad: your family, neighbours, co-workers, friends, etc. . So the mass line is first and foremost a way of doing work that connects us, as communists, with the working class.

The mass line can be broadly summed up in two principles. The first principle is “from the masses, to the masses”. To explain what I mean by this, as communists (or socialists or anarchists or whatever else) we have a certain set of ideas, both about how the world works but also about the type of society we want to live in. The masses don’t necessarily agree with us on these points yet, but rather have a set of very legitimate and real grievances with society as it’s currently structured: rent is too high, tuition fees are increasing, lack of access to services, etc. . And so it’s the job of any organizers to go among the masses, listen to their grievances, synthesize their issues with our understanding of reality, and carry that back to the masses in the form of demands or a political program. It’s an almost metabolic process of constant investigation and dialogue, and it’s a means of not only bringing up the political level of the masses by relating our politics to their struggles, but also of grounding ourselves in the masses. This is the most important aspect of the mass line.

The second principle is summed up in one of two ways. The first says to “unite the advanced, bring up the intermediate, and isolate the backwards” whereas the second is to “unite the advanced, raise the level of the intermediate, win over the backwards”. Whichever one applies depends on the context.[1] So what do we mean by this? At the most basic level politics is knowing who our friends and enemies are: what forces can be mobilized in favour of something we want to achieve, and what forces will be mobilized against us. When we’re talking about the masses, we can generally divide them into three categories: the advanced (those with progressive, revolutionary, and democratic ideas who are willing to act on them), the intermediate (those with confused ideas but who are inactive), and the backwards (those with regressive ideas). This second principle of the mass line instructs us to know who constitutes various sections of the masses, and what these political actors are doing and thinking, in order to allow us to properly respond and orient ourselves effectively toward them.

These two principles “from the masses, to the masses” and “unite the advanced, bring up the intermediate, and isolate the backwards” are the two basic principles of mass line.

III. The Mass Line is a Process

To get a little bit less abstract, the mass line, when put into practice, is a continuous process.

1) First, any organizer has to begin with social investigation: figuring out what the issues or grievances of the masses are, and then figuring out who the advanced, intermediate, and backwards are. This can take the form of surveys, reactions to lived experiences, and so on and so forth. Coming out of this process there should be a seemingly winnable campaign or goal identified, with a basic plan of action.

2) Once these questions have been answered (not in full; you’ll only be able to truly know the world through struggling to change it), one must gather all those forces which are capable and willing to struggle and fight for the campaign that has been initiated. This can take the form of meetings, a campaign call-out, etc.. This is the means by which the advanced are united.

3) Following the gathering of forces, it’s incumbent on organizers to put people into action, to intervene in the world in a political way and actually carry out the campaign that you’re trying to organize. Through the process of going to people and talking to them about the proposed campaign, you’re able to increase their political level; this is the process of “bringing up the intermediate”.

4) After initiating any sort of political action, there will inevitably be some sort of reaction to the work that you’re engaging in. An organizer should use this as an opportunity to see what results have been obtained through the political action, and re-evaluate the initial plan. Maybe you’ve won, maybe you haven’t, but either way there needs to be some form of accounting for and systematizing the effort that you’ve engaged in.

5) Every struggle that isn’t the final struggle against capitalism will inevitably die down at some point. It’s the job of organizers to consolidate the gains made during the campaign, either in the form of ensuring the reform you’ve fought for is successful or, more importantly, organizing new people that have been brought into political life through the work that you’ve initiated. At the end of the day, winning or losing the specific reform is not what’s important: advancing the class struggle, and increasing the level of struggle among the masses as well as the capacities of revolutionary organizers, is what matters. Consolidation should serve this end. In order for consolidation to happen, formal organizations are necessary; there needs to be something for people to be consolidated into.

6) Once new forces are consolidated, a new round of investigation should begin, and the cycle begins anew.

Mass line is not simply a set of static principles, but when applied, is a radically democratic and vibrant way of organizing.

IV. Concrete Application of the Mass Line: General Assemblies at uOttawa

Moving completely away from the abstract at this point, I’d like to talk about how the RSM has concretely applied the mass line in the various struggles we’ve undertaken. The RSM is relatively new, insofar as we began the process of forming the RSM in December of 2012. Despite having engaged in a number of different activities and campaigns, I’ll be focusing on our most involved campaign: the campaign for General Assemblies at the University of Ottawa.

For us at uOttawa, our experience organizing students through the student union constituted the social investigation we undertook. We knew that students at uOttawa were incredibly disillusioned with the student union and had virtually no confidence in the executives of our student federation; they correctly understood the student federation to be bureaucratic, ineffective, etc. . And so in the process of figuring out what to do, we identified those forces willing to struggle for democratic decision making structures as being part of the advanced in this given context. In turn –and this really set us apart I think from other attempts, of which there were many, to get GAs at uOttawa- we identified CFS aligned student union bureaucrats as being part of the backwards, insofar as they didn’t fully support the democratic program we were putting forward.

We began the campaign by doing basic promotion (postering, social networks, etc.) for a campaign launch event. This was in February of 2013. The launch event gathered all those who were interested in working towards GAs at uOttawa, uniting the advanced around democratic politics. We came up with a series of 10 essential features that a GA had to include, which consisted of basic things like: all students have a vote, all students can call GAs, all students can put forward motions, etc. but also included more radically democratic demands such as: the GA must be the highest decision making body of the student federation, and the GA should have the ability to impeach student union executives.

We then launched the campaign. We decided that for a GA to have any sort of democratic legitimacy, it would have to be voted in by students, and not pushed through the council of the student union. At uOttawa, in order to get a referendum question on the ballot during the student union elections, it is necessary to submit a petition containing 1500 signatures of undergrad students. Given our size at the time this was a fairly daunting task, but we mobilized and were able to accomplish it. When we relaunched the campaign in September of 2013 we had only a few hundred signatures; by mid-October 2013, we had managed to collect over 1700. Two things are worth noting here: first, collecting petition signatures made it necessary to engage with the student population as a whole, and this engagement necessarily involved political discussion and debate with students, thus “bringing up the intermediate”. Second, as we campaigned more people became interested in the work we were doing, and either got involved with the GA campaign or joined the RSM; the process of consolidation began during the campaign itself.

Afraid to lose the momentum we had built over the 2013 Fall semester, we insisted on holding a referendum as soon as possible. The only date that worked with the exam schedule and within the constraints of the student union’s constitution was the end of November. This was likely a tactical mistake on our part; the poor timing of the referendum combined with a referendum boycott campaign promoted by the campus reactionaries resulted in us missing quorum by a few hundred votes, which was fairly heartbreaking. However, the response was overwhelmingly in favour of GAs, with 86% of students that voted voting in favour. We were able to leverage this support and force the student union executives and council (the more progressive bureaucrats were split between forcing GAs through the council, which we opposed, and holding a second referendum) to hold a second referendum during the student union general elections in February of 2014.

The second referendum was much more successful. The campus reactionaries decided to organize a “NO” side to the referendum, but did so quite poorly. In the end voter turnout was higher than normal for a student election, with over 60% voting in favour of GAs. In the process, the RSM at uOttawa had transformed from being primarily a reading group into an organization that engaged in both theory and practice. Through the process of consolidation –bringing new people in on the basis of GAs, being open with our communist politics, and activating supporters who until then had not had a reason to get involved- our membership tripled; far greater than the 40% growth we were aiming for when we launched the campaign. And now, as we prepare for the new school year, we are beginning our second round of social investigation, looking into how best to mobilize for GAs and what initiatives we will bring forward there.

In conclusion, there are two things worth emphasizing. The first is that when we started the GA campaign, we were unsure if we had the capacity to win. It was only in the process of engaging in that struggle that we built capacity, both by improving the skills of our organizers, and engaging new members. Revolutionaries should adopt a dialectical view of organizing: had we simply looked at the balance of forces in February of 2013, adopting an empiricist view of organizing, we wouldn’t have launched the campaign. But, by understanding that through action there is consolidation and growth, we decided to launch the campaign anyway. The second point is that the GA was never the end goal in-and-of-itself. Yes, there is something to be said for direct democracy and the emancipatory politics behind direct democracy. But direct democracy can also be a platform for reactionary politics; the GA as a decision making model is not particularly special. We understood the GA to be a step in the direction of our final goal, which is the mobilization of all proletarian students towards the destruction of capitalism and the university: GAs are another forum in which to engage in class struggle. And so, I’d like to emphasize, the specific reform was not particularly important: what was important was the campaign’s capacity, and the capacity of GAs, to raise the level of class struggle on the campus.

V. What the Mass Line Isn’t

Up until now, I have only talked about what the mass line is. Before talking about why, abstractly, the mass line is important to communists, I will highlight a few things the mass line isn’t.

The mass-line is not tailism. Tailism is a type of practice by which revolutionaries only allow themselves to follow the most advanced ideas of the masses, never moving beyond these ideas or putting forward any revolutionary politics. Some use the mass line as a means of excusing this type of practice, saying that according to the mass line we have to go to the masses and meet the masses where they are at politically. While this is true, it is only half of the mass line: revolutionaries are also supposed to raise the political level of the masses in the process of struggle, and this can only be done if revolutionaries openly put forward revolutionary politics. The mass line is intended to raise the level of the masses and connect them with revolutionary struggle, not serve as an excuse for revolutionaries to hide their politics.

The mass line is not econonism. Economism can be characterized as a type of practice in which economic demands are raised to a primary place of importance, while political demands are sidelined or ignored. For instance, fighting for increased minimum wage without connecting that fight with the struggle to end the wage system and capitalism, is an example of economism. While the mass line is concerned with specific demands and grievances of the masses, it does not stop there: it is a means by which revolutionaries can connect these specific demands with the broader revolutionary struggle, and pull the masses into that struggle.

The mass line is not bureaucratism. This should be fairly obvious but it is not. In many of our organizing experiences, we have seen otherwise democratic structures perverted by power-hungry bureaucrats, even when the stakes are relatively low –this is especially common within student unions, as I’m sure everyone here can attest to. There are some people, who without saying it openly, but through their actions, conceive of the mass line not as a radically democratic way of connecting the masses with revolutionaries, but as a means by which the masses can be controlled. Revolutionaries should use the mass line to awaken the potential of the masses.

The mass line is not commandism. The mass-line is necessary because revolutionaries hold a different set of ideas from the masses about how the world operates and how it should operate; we are revolutionaries, the masses are not. An organizer must be conscious of this difference. If, for instance, we were to insist that the masses become revolutionaries in order to work with us, we will very quickly find ourselves isolated. Commandism is the practice of standing ahead of the masses politically and effectively commanding them to “catch-up”. It is a self-isolating practice, but one that is practiced by much of the “left” in Canada. While the mass-line involves raising the political level of the masses, this is done through struggle, not through condescension, sloganeering, or demanding the masses politicize.

Finally, the mass line is not mass fetishism. There is a tendency, predominately but not exclusively among white male communists in the first world, to fetishize the masses. Everything that the masses do, according to these people, is somehow sacred and shouldn’t be questioned or criticized. This phenomenon is closely linked to workerism, or the extension of identity-politic type concepts to class: to be a worker is considered another aspect of one’s identity. This approach to the masses is usually rooted in a romanticized view of the masses and class struggle, and is usually found within people that have very little connection to the masses or class struggle. Revolutionaries can and must criticize backwards practices found within the masses, practices like, but not limited to: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. . The mass line is a means by which these incorrect ideas can be systematically abolished, not encouraged simply because the masses hold them.

VI. Why Does the Mass Line Matter?

As anti-capitalists, our goal is revolution. All of Marxism can be summed up under the question “How should the working class go about making revolution?” Why then, as anti-capitalists, is it important to engage in mass work –fighting for reforms, or for struggles that on the surface don’t appear to be revolutionary- rather than simply “revolutionary” work? How does the mass line fit into the broader plan of advancing the class struggle in Canada?

Broadly, there are two large “crises” within the left in North America. First, there is the crisis of organization: there is not, at this time, a revolutionary vanguard or revolutionary mass organizations (or even mass movements!) in Canada or the United States. As such, there is no central organization to which the experiences of class struggle can be systematically summed up as a means of moving the class struggle forward. And as the masses themselves are disorganized, engaging in any sort of sustained political action is difficult.

Second, there is a crisis of confidence. If you were to talk to nearly any worker today, most of them would acknowledge that the present way that society is organized is fundamentally unjust. They wouldn’t be able to articulate precisely what is wrong with society in scientific or Marxist terms, but they would have some idea as to how society could be run better. They may even concede that socialism and communism sound like ideal solutions: Cold War anti-communism is largely a thing of the past. However, almost universally, the masses (and even some of the “left”!) do not believe that any positive change is possible. And how could they be expected to, after nearly 40 years of constant defeats for the working class in North America?

The mass line solves both of these issues. First, the mass line organizes the masses, and builds the capacity of revolutionary organizations. It builds the fighting capacity of the masses and revolutionaries. The proper application of the mass line –I should add this has yet to be figured out by any revolutionary organization in North America- solves the problem of organization. Second, the mass line shows the masses that small victories are possible, and builds their fighting spirit. It unleashes the potential of the masses in the direction of the revolutionary transformation of society. It causes the masses to think “If small victories are possible, then perhaps large victories (like socialism) are too!”. The mass line, if applied in a consciously revolutionary manner, solves the problem of confidence.

More concretely, there are a number of other reasons why revolutionaries need to adopt the mass line as their method of practice. First, organization is absolutely necessary if we are to overthrow capitalism and build socialism. As mentioned above, the masses need to be organized. However, we should go further and say that even if the task of overthrowing capitalism without organizing the masses was possible (it isn’t), the task of building socialism without organizing the masses is impossible. Mass organizations by necessity must form the democratic basis of socialism; if they don’t exist, socialism is impossible.

Second, in a very direct way through the achievement of small victories, the mass line allows us to improve the conditions of the masses. We must not lapse into economism; at the end of the day the specific reform or victory is not important, but rather any mass line activity must serve to raise the level of the class struggle. However, small victories will inevitably be won, and improving the conditions of the masses should be something close to the heart of every revolutionary.

Third, the mass line keeps us grounded in the masses. Everyone is familiar with the stereotyped armchair revolutionary that is well versed in theory, but is totally disconnected from practice and regular people. Many of us know people like this. The mass line forces even the most removed of us out of our comfort zones and forces us to ground our practice in the people themselves, ensuring that our politics are also grounded in the lived experiences of the masses.

Fourth, as we mentioned earlier, ending capitalism and building socialism without the participation of the masses as a leading force is impossible. The only way for the masses to realize that capitalism is their enemy and take up the fight for socialism is to raise the political level of the masses, to show them that their specific grievances relate back to the broader revolutionary struggle. The mass line is the means by which revolutionaries raise the political level of the masses.

Fifth, and perhaps this is a bit crass, but the mass line is the only means by which revolutionaries can build their own forces in a sustainable and effective way. When we consider what a revolutionary vanguard organization should be, we ultimately think that it should be a collection of the most advanced elements of the working class that have united for the purposes of overthrowing capitalism. The only way to figure out who the most advanced elements of the masses are –politically, and in terms of leadership capacity and ability to struggle- is to actively engage with the masses, and build new proletarian leadership within the masses. In this sense, the mass line is not only necessary to solve the problem of organization within the masses, but also to solve the problem of organization within the vanguard as well.

So, with this being said, why should revolutionaries care about mass line methods of practice? Because without the mass line there can be no revolution, and a revolutionary that isn’t working towards building revolution isn’t much of a revolutionary at all.

VII. Students and the Mass Line

In conclusion, it’s perhaps useful to state explicitly why the mass line as a method of work is important for revolutionaries doing work with students. First, the mass line provides a framework that allows for revolutionaries to engage in effective methods of work: to win victories, it is necessary to use the mass line. Second, basing ourselves in a strong class analysis of the conditions on our campuses allows us to identify the advanced and backwards elements, and to correctly orient ourselves and our struggles towards these divergent forces. And finally, the mass line is important insofar as we recognize that in English Canada, proletarian students do not make up the majority of students within universities (though possibly colleges and high schools are majority proletarian, depending on program and neighborhood). The mass line, which is a revolutionary method of work –in other words, sets its sights on the transformation of society and not on a more narrow “student power”, “socialism-on-one-campus” based agenda-, allows us to orient our actions towards the minority of students with revolutionary potential and organize them in the service of the broader working class and revolutionary movement. Without the mass line, student organizing is a dead-end for revolutionaries. With the mass line, and with accurately understanding the role of proletarian students in the broader revolutionary struggle, we can effectively coordinate our on-campus efforts with the struggle that is unfolding in the rest of Canadian society: we can positively contribute to the struggle to end this rotten system and build a better world.

[1] The original quote by Mao stated “win over the backwards”, but for some reason that is beyond me, “isolate the backwards” begins to show up in reflections on the mass line in the 1970s and early 1980s. Generally the two forms are applicable to different situations: “isolate the backwards” works well when doing initial political activities in contexts where there is an establishment left, when dealing with cadre level people of different political tendencies where it is necessary to isolate counter-revolutionary elements from the masses. However, when doing political work in apolitical situations –in places where the masses aren’t coming into contact with an establishment left- “winning over the backwards” is a more possible goal.

The MER-RSM is still a fairly new organization. It was conceived of as a result of several years’ worth of experience within the student movement in the Montreal area and in the student strikes that took place there, the critique of the social-democratic student movement in Ottawa from militants located there, as well as the initiation of communist student work in Ontario following the 2nd Canadian Revolutionary Congress which was held in Toronto in 2010. The MER-RSM has been an attempt at building a revolutionary mass organization in Canada, particularly since the first Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students in 2012. On some campuses we have a solid basis, on others we are trying to build in places where, for whatever reason, there has been no concerted struggle for some time. Given this, we understand that some people may be curious about our intentions, our practice, and our methods. We are gladly taking this opportunity to more precisely articulate our fundamental approach and positions.

We consider one basis of our movement to be an acknowledgement of the multi-class nature of the student movement. To consider students a homogeneous social group is a serious error. Just as Canada is a capitalist society in which there is a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in all areas of social and ideological life, students from colleges and universities come from various class backgrounds and continue to belong to different, fundamentally antagonistic social classes even while they study.

While high schools function almost as prisons for young people, with the majority of students coming from the working class, universities are the ideological bastions of the current system. Over the last thirty years, components of various critical theories – some of which are at times very incisive, relevant and effective in that criticism – have been integrated into the curricula of Canadian universities. From the creation of whole programmes of study relating to gender or race, the hiring of certain activist ‘celebrities’ as professors, or the acceptance of a certain type of “activist” groups like the PIRGs and student unions, this has been an effective strategy for co-optation of these ‘critical’ approaches by the bourgeoisie.

However, proletarian students are disproportionately impacted by the austerity programmes that followed the economic crisis of 2008 and which are being pursued by every bourgeois political party, in power or not. Consequently, the struggle for the access to education should not be fought because of vague liberal humanist notions of a “right” to education, but rather because it is in the interest of working class students to have access to education. Furthermore, we must also tackle the fact that universities are the means by which the bourgeoisie maintains its monopoly over knowledge: i.e. how knowledge is developed, what is studied, how the results are used, and who may access it. The class perspective should be advanced and discussed beyond some vague notion of social justice; to maintain this confusion is holding the proletariat – whether student or not – back in its class consciousness.

We believe that the revolutionary strategy applicable to Canada includes building mass organizations of a new type, which do not hesitate to break with the old ideas and old conceptions that have failed time and again. To do so, we are trying to build a new movement with humility, by putting politics in command. Here are some elements from our document “Limits of the current student movement”, which was a pillar for the First Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students. We oppose what could be described as the theory of gradual radicalization. Gradual radicalization means essentially a process of slow, incremental radicalization of the masses through struggles until the cataclysmic revolutionary uprising. It is clear that this gradual radicalization leads to an essentially reformist and economist practice with a professed adhesion to a revolutionary horizon by those that take this approach. This strategic perspective expresses itself concretely in the student sphere as the channelling of all militancy into the framework of student union bureaucracy (the winning of executive and council positions), the proposed tool for this incremental radicalization on campuses.

The struggle for reforms – or immediate demands – and the struggle for revolution and socialism are not opposed or mutually exclusive. The two can be linked, addressing the pressing needs of the masses without slipping into opportunism, without compromising on our fundamental objectives. However, the dominant strategy pursued in even the most radical circles of the student movement does not manage to link demands for reforms with revolutionary organization. Struggling to transform a social system also creates the need to organize differently. To have a qualitatively different movement from what already exists is not a question of creating a new organization, but rather it is a quest of uniting consciously on a basis of common principles and objectives, from a revolutionary point of view and with aspirations to revolution. For too long the political activity of youth and students in Canada has been limited by the dominant major trends of the student movement: reformism – whether ‘radical’ or otherwise – and class conciliation. Revolutionary students do not seek to eliminate student unions. Revolutionary students struggle against reformist currents that trap the student movement and seek to organize, to promote and develop honestly and openly a broad movement of ideological struggle within the student movement and from this starting point, promote a new way of involvement for students, in their forms of organization and struggle.

We therefore orient our work toward proletarian students directly rather than through the false proxy of the student federations. In places where these bodies serve as meaningful sites of political struggle and organization of proletarian students – as in Quebec – we engage with them in order to popularize the revolutionary, communist approaches to the pressing political questions of the day and to organize those proletarian students as part of a class for itself.

Where these structures are alienated from their membership, bureaucratized and ossified beyond repair – as in English Canada – we make clear our opposition to the methods of work and political orientation of these student unions (CASA and the CFS) but ensure that this same alienated bureaucracy does not become the axis around which our work is oriented. We see this error manifest as two distinct strategies – on the one hand are the futile attempts by some organizations to ingratiate and integrate themselves into this bureaucracy in order to change its character “from the inside”, into a genuine and solid organ of class power. On the other there are public campaigns which attempt to organize the masses of students and youth on the basis of critiques of these bureaucracies. Both these strategies are ultimately doomed because of the alienation of the student unions from their membership. Due to the multi-class character of student populations, a student union with mandatory membership can only be proletarian in its outlook insofar as it is undemocratic in its methods. Moreover, orienting one’s work purely toward critiques-from-the-left of these alienated – and largely unknown – student unions is necessarily limited in its potential to reach masses of proletarian students by precisely because proletarian students are not engaged with the student unions to begin with. Instead, it is imperative that we organize proletarian students directly, voluntarily and democratically, on the bases of revolutionary politics and on demands which will advance the conditions and organization of proletarian students within a broader strategy for revolution.

In 1903, Lenin wrote:

When the [Socialist] student breaks with the revolutionaries and politically minded people of all other trends, this by no means implies the break-up of the general student and educational organisations. On the contrary, only on the basis of a perfectly definite programme can and should one work among the widest student circles to broaden their academic outlook and to propagate scientific socialism, i.e., Marxism. (Lenin: The Tasks of the Revolutionary Youth, 1903)

Thus, on campuses where there are groups or militants of the Revolutionary Student Movement, we support the most correct ideas and the most legitimate expressions of the anger of the masses. We called for the formation of general assemblies to replace the bureaucratic executive cliques, which are in effect just junior clubs of the bourgeois political parties. We try to support the most progressive proposals in student assemblies, activist groups, and popular gatherings, especially positions to expose imperialism and the necessary need to support the right to self-determination of Indigenous peoples in Canada. We support campus groups that resist the relentless attacks of the bourgeoisie for the control of academic institutions. We call for combative events on anti-capitalist bases, including May Day protests. These examples from the past few months may serve as a preliminary indication of the path we intend to take.

[Experience tells] us that the right task, policy and style of work invariably conform with the demands of the masses at a given time and place and invariably strengthen our ties with the masses, and the wrong task, policy and style of work invariably disagree with the demands of the masses at a given time and place and invariably alienate us from the masses. The reason why such evils as dogmatism, empiricism, commandism, tailism, sectarianism, bureaucracy and an arrogant attitude in work are definitely harmful and intolerable, and why anyone suffering from these maladies must overcome them, is that they alienate us from the masses. (Mao, On coalition government, April 1945)

The concerted, coherent and organized action of revolutionaries in Canada is necessary for the development of the class struggle, including among students. This action must be done on a coherent basis with the goal of communist revolution in mind in a way that enables us to see progress, modest as it may be. This task is of immense importance; far from being a struggle for the control of established organizations (placing a person in an elected position without revealing their political opinions, boasting and exaggerating achievements, competing in popularity contests, etc.), it is rather the masses living in Canada – among them a large number of youth and students as well as Indigenous peoples – who must position themselves, to start to move. Militants of the MER-RSM wish to be part of a process in which we humbly serve the people, discuss the most relevant revolutionary ideas, and learn to fight the capitalist system on a daily basis. To help guide our work in doing so, militants of the MER-RSM adopted the following principles during the second Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students. Let us mention them here:

1) To continue to build the RSM by

Forming new groups where they don’t exist;

Working with existing organisations, where they exist;

Rallying new groups to the next conference.

2) To work towards a new movement in theory and practice in serving the people with the revolutionary principles of:

Anti-capitalism;

Radicalism;

Militancy;

Internationalism;

Independence from the state;

Against reformism;

And struggling for a broad based education which is scientific and proletarian in nature.

3) To develop a proletarian line on feminism, anti-racism and struggles against other forms of oppression.

4) To hold a 3rd conference in early 2014 in Montreal.

5) To hold a speaking tour in late 2013, visiting various locales, to promote the RSM and the 3rd conference.

6) To hold an event in the fall in Vancouver to promote the RSM.

7) Each city/campus/organisation will name someone responsible for maintaining links with the RSM and to mobilise for the next conference.

8) Each city/campus/organisation will, in the spirit of anti-imperialism:

Mobilise for the July 1st day of action in support of the people’s war in India;

Stand in solidarity with the people of Syria against imperialist aggression;

Oppose Canadian imperialism in all of its manifestations.

9) To integrate new traditions of revolutionary struggle.

Consequently, these principles serve as an illumination for our work, yet find their formal expressions very differently in different regions. They serve as key pillars to advance the political organization of revolutionary and proletarian students in Canada. But of course, our work does not stop here. We therefore call for a third Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students.

True to our principles, the very principles that have guided Communists since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, we will disdain to hide our aims. May all individuals, groups, or organizations that wish to debate, discuss and unite with us do it openly, without any fear of being judged or considered ignorant, with no insults or hypocrisy.

At the same time, we call everyone that recognizes the necessity of organizing youth and students as part of the broader class struggle, of the necessity of overcoming reformism, inaction, and bureaucracy, to participate in the next Conference of Revolutionary Youth and Students, to be held March 1 and 2, 2014 in Montreal.

May all those interested in combining their forces and their voices in the collective struggle for the abolition of capitalism, a system based on universal injustice and incessant repression, crushing exploitation and oppression, daily alienation, war and imperialism which takes the lives of our brothers and sisters, join us as well.

The MER-RSM is here to stay. Let’s break this rotten system once and for all.

First and foremost, the Revolutionary Student Movement (MER-RSM) would like to congratulate the Young Communist League (YCL) on launching the call for the YCL’s 26th Central Convention. The MER-RSM is a new attempt to build a Canada-wide revolutionary, combative, militant, and anti-capitalist student movement. We aim to organise students in the service of the broader working-class movement, towards communism. We are an initiative of the Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR-RCP). Since launching in December of 2012 we have quickly grown and now have active chapters across Canada in BC, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Insofar as we are in favour of disseminating communist politics throughout the student milieu, we see the achievement of your 26th Central Convention to be a positive development in the class struggle in Canada.

As part of building the MER-RSM, we have consistently sought principled unity with other revolutionary forces throughout Canada. To this end, the MER-RSM has for some time now requested that a series of debates on “The Role of Revolutionaries in the Student Movement” be organized between the MER-RSM and the YCL, as a means of presenting and reconciling the two distinct communist approaches to student organizing in Canada. In the absence of any movement on that front, below we have presented a critique of the Main Political Report that was prepared by your Central Committee in preparation for your 26th Central Convention. We hope that this will lead towards a line struggle between our two organizations, and ultimately towards the unity of communist student activists in Canada.

Our critique focuses on three areas of the report with which we disagree. First, the MER-RSM does not believe that the YCL’s Central Committee has an accurate handle on the current world situation. Notably absent from the Report is any mention of the rise of Russian and Chinese imperialisms, and most importantly, there is no mention of the revolutionary processes currently underway in Turkey, the Philippines, India, Afghanistan, and Nepal. Second, we believe that the distinction between revolution and reform is misrepresented within the report; we will present a mass-line solution to this problem. Third, we believe that the understanding of the student movement as a democratic mass movement focused on democratic rights –and by extension an arena in which class struggle is inappropriate and detrimental – is a flawed and fundamentally social-democratic understanding of the student movement.

The World Situation

Given that the job of revolutionaries in Canada is to make revolution in Canada, we will not spend much time dealing with a misunderstanding of the world situation by the YCL Central Committee. Indeed, disagreements over this-or-that international event are likely in any organization; a precondition for unity between communist students in Canada should not be total agreement on international affairs. This being said, there are two important areas to which we wish to draw our comrade’s attentions that are not included in the Main Political Report’s section on the world situation. They are: the rise of other imperialisms (specifically Russian and Chinese imperialism), as well as a lack of any mention of the People’s Wars currently being fought in India, the Philippines, and Turkey, or the revolutionary processes in Peru, Afghanistan, and Nepal.

In the Main Political Report, section #45 specifically mentions imperialism’s renewed interest in Africa. The Report is correct to state that European and American imperialisms are attempting to re-divide the continent amongst themselves, in a process reminiscent of the ‘Scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s. However, the report does not mention that American and European imperialisms are not the only imperialisms intervening on the African continent. Since capitalist restoration in China in the 1980s, Chinese imperialism has also sought the African continent as a new source of super-profits. In the 1990s alone trade between China and Africa increased by 700%; today China is Africa’s biggest trading partner, with over 800 Chinese firms (most of them private) doing business in Africa, predominately in infrastructural development projects and banking. Chinese finance capital bank-rolls the export of Chinese capital into Africa; China has become an imperialist power. Indeed, even aside from expansion in Africa, how else can we understand China’s recent acquisition of the right to exploit 1/3 of the Ecuadorian rainforest in a search for oil other than as an imperialist venture on the part of the Chinese ruling class?

In Section #52, the Main Political Report mentions that the encirclement of Russia and China is the key geo-political objective of US imperialism. However, the Report does not specify that this attempt at encirclement is inter-imperialist rivalry; the implication within the Report suggests that China and Russia are at the very least not imperialist countries.

Given that it is always the job of communists to defeat their own bourgeoisie, why does an understanding of Chinese and Russian imperialisms matter at this specific historical juncture? As Russian and Chinese imperialisms continue to rise, and as American imperialism continues to decline, inter-imperialist rivalry will increasingly become more and more heated. A look at major international headlines over the past several years is all that it takes to confirm this observation; yesterday a crisis in Syria, today a crisis in the South China Sea and Ukraine, each more volatile than the last. As inter-imperialist rivalry increases and becomes more volatile, so too increases the danger of another World War. The current situation in Ukraine, where NATO and Russia posture for supremacy in the region, is a perfect example of such a phenomenon; indeed, the talking heads of the bourgeois media now speak of the approach of a second Cold War. It is only through a proper understanding of inter-imperialist rivalry that communists can equip themselves to combat the war danger as it arises, and organize to prevent a third World War within our lifetimes. That the Main Political Report is silent about this necessity, on the eve of a potential proxy-war in the Ukraine between Russia and NATO, is troublesome.

The lack of mention of Russian or Chinese imperialism is not the only aspect of the current world situation that is missing from the Main Political Report. Most importantly, the report lacks any mention of the People’s Wars being fought in India, Turkey, or the Philippines, or the revolutionary processes in Peru, Nepal, and Afghanistan. These revolutions and revolutionary processes are the most important international events in the world today, from a communist perspective. For instance, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which is in the process of fighting an armed struggle across large swaths of the Indian countryside, has been labelled the most significant internal security threat to India by the Indian state. In regions where the Indian state has been effectively liquidated, it is beginning the construction of a new state at the service of the oppressed classes. Because this is taking place in the second most populous country in the world, when our Indian comrades are successful at seizing state power throughout the entire territory of India, such an act will have a world-historical significance not unlike the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Our critique cannot contain detailed information on all of these People’s Wars or revolutionary processes, and so we invite comrades to investigate for themselves these exciting events. However, we do find it disappointing that the Main Political Report would spend so much time on the Bolivarian process, for instance, while ignoring the very real and exciting revolutions in South-Asia and elsewhere. These events provide inspiration for billions of proletarians worldwide; while the methods are not totally transferable to Canada, the struggles of comrades in India, Nepal, Turkey, and elsewhere are a great source of excitement and inspiration for comrades here. Defence of the revolutionary processes in these countries should form a central part of the international solidarity work of communists in Canada; instead the Main Political Report is silent.

Revolution or Reform?

The Main Political Report makes frequent reference to both revolutionary struggle and immediate reforms. Three sections stand out as examples of the way that the relation between these two types of struggle, or two sets of political demands, is conceived of by the YCL’s Central Committee. Section #299 of the Report says that “The YCL is a unique group in the youth and student movement because it ‘gets’ this unity of reform and revolution.”, in section #203b the Report says “There is no contradiction, in our view, between advancing socialism as the only genuine alternative to the current capitalist system, and our principled commitment to work to further the immediate and basic interests of students.”, and in section #166, one finds text reading “This view also has an expression in the ultra-left which sees mass organizations as backward or “inherently reformist” and sees the solution as the formation of small revolutionary groups, whether in labour or the student movement.”. While these sections can be understood as veiled critiques of the MER-RSM, they also point to a base misunderstanding of the role of revolution and reform in the broader revolutionary struggle, and the MER-RSM’s stance on this issue.

On the surface, the MER-RSM agrees with these statements; there does not have to be an antagonism between revolution and reform, and mass organizations –even those that raise reformist demands- have a key role to play in the broader revolutionary process. However, we wish to remind comrades here that socialism and communism are not simply a series of reforms, but rather the conquest of political power by the working class. Thus, while it is correct to say that there is a unity between revolution and reform, it is not wholly correct to say that such a unity exists; it is only a specific type of reformism, or reformism undertaken in a specific context, which advances the revolutionary struggle.

What is the role of the struggle for reforms in the broader revolutionary struggle, according to the MER-RSM? Let us start from the assumption that our goal is communism, and the conditions in which we are working are conditions as they currently exist; that is to say, we have abstract goals (communism) and concrete conditions (reality) as the two poles which must be mediated. Our job is to figure out how to get to communism from here; how to turn concrete conditions into our abstract goal. Being Marxists, we understand that the motor-force of this process is class struggle. Thus, any action that is taken should be evaluated on the basis of whether or not that action advances the class struggle, or, whether or not it concretely advances concrete conditions towards the abstract goal of communism. Specific reforms that are fought for need to be subordinated –and consciously and openly subordinated- to this broader revolutionary process.. Fighting for reforms as part of the broader revolutionary struggle, and having the fight for reforms subordinated to the goal of revolution, is the true unity of revolution and reform.

This is the qualification and method that the MER-RSM uses to decide what sorts of reformist struggles to engage in. And we do partake in reformist struggles, be it the 2012 Quebec Student Strike, the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa General Assembly Campaign (which one can also find a veiled critique against in section #201b and #201c of the Main Political Report, though one wonders why such a mass based democratic campaign wouldn’t be supported by the YCL Central Committee…), the University of Toronto Transitional Year Program Preservation Alliance, the fight against Men’s Rights Activists, and so on and so forth. What is important in each of these struggles is that while reformist work is engaged in, a revolutionary line is put forward by the MER-RSM. By applying the mass line –the principles of “from the masses, to the masses” and “unite the advanced, bring up the intermediate, and isolate the backwards”- we are able to use reformist work, subordinated to a broader revolutionary program and line, to produce new communists and advance the class struggle, rather than simply tailing social-democratic campaigns or groups.

In this vein we think it is a mistake to bring up the question of creating or not creating separate groups within the context of the question of immediate reforms. First, the YCL is itself a small group that is organizationally separate from the mass movements into which it intervenes; we are left to conclude from the Report that according to the YCL’s Central Committee, the YCL alone has the right to exist. But, different demands also necessitate different organizations, tailored to different sections of the masses. For instance, when the uOttawa section of the MER-RSM undertook the General Assembly campaign, it struck a separate organization –separate from both the student union and the MER-RSM – to form the organizational basis of the campaign. This was necessary as the student union bureaucrats could not be trusted to carry the campaign to its proper conclusions, and the level of unity required to fight for a general assembly was much lower than is required for membership in the MER-RSM. Such an organization –an organization of the intermediate- was far more successful in organizing the intermediate section of the masses than we would have been had we subordinated ourselves to the student union (as anger against the bureaucrats was a pull factor for the campaign), or dictated that only those that form the advanced section of the masses of students could involve themselves in the campaign through membership in the MER-RSM. At the end of the day the campaign was successful and the MER-RSM at uOttawa grew three-fold, vindicating our understanding of how to engage in struggles for specific reforms and the mass-line. We understand the creation or destruction of organizations to be a question of tactics at any given point, and not a question of principle; the latter is a sectarian position.

This methodology stands in stark contrast to the approach outlined by the YCL’s Central Committee in the Main Political Report. Starting at section #175, titled “Mass Action”, and after advancing a critique of more militant direct action approaches, the Report outlines the key strategy being put forward by the YCL: “The litmus test for evaluating tactics is to identify what tactics move the greatest number of masses into the struggle, in the strategic direction.” While on the surface this seems obvious, there is a populist current that runs through this statement: it is not simply a matter of moving the largest number of people, but of advancing the class struggle. And advancing the class struggle can only happen by moving an increasingly larger number of workers to the correct politics, to communist politics. The decisive necessity of advancing the political level of the masses is lost in the YCL’s argument; instead we get references to uniting various strata of the working class. While unity is important, it must be a principled unity around a correct political line and practice; it is far better for the class struggle to produce ten communists than to produce one hundred social-democrats.

Aside from overtures toward the unity of revolution and reform, it is unclear how the YCL puts this unity into practice. Indeed, it seems that the majority of work that the YCL has undertaken –be it the “Raise the Minimum Wage Campaign”, the Charter of Youth Rights, supporting the Canadian Federation of Students, etc. – lacks any sort of revolutionary aspect. For instance, while the Main Political Report spends some time criticising the right-wing labour bureaucracy (section #169), at the end of the day it re-affirms the centrality of the same labour bureaucracy to the student movement (section #178), in effect defaulting to social-democratic reformism. The same can be found in the Report’s approach toward the CFS. And while the same Report argues for extra-parliamentary struggle, we are left to equate mass-action with “mass political action outside parliament” (section #178) ultimately showing the focus –unconscious or not – of the YCL’s mass work. We do not doubt that there are sincere revolutionaries within the YCL, and perhaps even on the Central Committee of the YCL; however, the political perspectives put forward by the YCL’s leadership are decidedly reformist and lack any sort of unity between revolution and reform in practice.

Class Struggle or Democratic Struggle?

Up until the release of the Main Political Report, we had incorrectly conceived that the main difference between the MER-RSM and the YCL was the role of the CFS within the broader student movement, with our position being to largely ignore the CFS and the YCL position being to support the CFS. While this disagreement remains the main practical difference between our two organizations, there is a theoretical difference that lies at the root: the conception of the nature of the student movement itself.

The YCL conceives of the student movement as a democratic movement (as opposed to a class movement) engaged in a struggle for democratic rights. In section #19 of the Main Political Report, the YCL Central Committee writes “The youth and students’ struggle is not identical to the class struggle of working people because it is also a democratic struggle, a multi-class struggle.” And in turn, the “right” to education is conceived of as a “democratic right of the people” (section #197b). In turn, the main task that the YCL sets itself is to align the student movement with the labour movement as “the progressive, democratic outlook recognizes that the students have interests that align with the interests of the people.”

The YCL is decidedly against applying class struggle politics to the student movement; in section #202, the Report states (and here we quote at length because the perspective is significant):

It is also very easy to write-off an inactive campus as rancid with apathetic, privileged, or ‘bourgeoisified’ youth. Some ‘left’ critics go further than this ‘blame the victim’ approach and announce that there are ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeois’ students and, throwing unity to the wind, advocate an internal struggle within the movement. This might appear to be a logical application of Marxist analysis: identify the working class forces within a movement, and propose that they be pitted against the non working class elements. The mistake, however, is to confuse the class with the movement. Today, it is difficult to find a people’s struggle, other than the labour movement, which is not in some way a class mix. As big business dominates all aspects of social life, and attacks even basic democratic rights, many social strata is [sic] drawn into action. Extending the “class war” into the student movement would be disastrous, undermining the fighting unity of student forces, orienting the struggle inward instead of against the main enemy. This amounts to, unfortunately, empty stentorian posturing about the pure revolutionary student line and helps the right-wing agenda, including defederation.

This section is also a thinly veiled critique of the MER-RSM, directly referencing our position that students can be considered either proletarian or bourgeois. However, the YCL Central Committee completely misses the point of the MER-RSM’s line, and in so doing not only obfuscates issues more than solving them, but advances a social-democratic approach to the question of student organizing in the process.

First, we should take issue with the YCL’s use of the term “student movement”. The YCL implies that there is some sort of vibrant living movement that the MER-RSM has decided to isolate itself from. The YCL locates the student movement in English Canada within the CFS. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth; while the CFS claims to represent over 500 000 students, we would hazard that upwards of 90% of its members don’t even know that the CFS exists. Instead of the leading body of a movement or a mass organization, the CFS is best understood of as a social-democratic lobby organization that sometimes fights for the right to free education; indeed, as the Report itself suggests, the CFS has failed to do even basic membership mobilizations for the past several years. While the Report critiques some aspects of the CFS, the YCL Central Committee does not understand that the bureaucratic nature of the CFS’ activism is itself a result of a politics that subordinates electoral victory –be it at the union or parliamentary level – to all other actions. Thus, the Report implores us to not make structural critiques (even though we advance a critique on the level of politics and practice, not exclusively structure) of the CFS in the name of unity. But, the MER-RSM has to question the content of such a unity that sees a revolutionary organization tied to a defunct social-democratic lobby organization that is only able to retain its membership through lawsuits.

With this in mind, the MER-RSM absolutely recognizes that what passes for the student movement is in fact a multi-class movement. This is perhaps a more appropriate statement in Quebec where there actually is a movement to speak of. We recognize the multi-class nature of the student movement both in terms of objective class composition –i.e. there are students that come from a multitude of class backgrounds –as well as the class horizons of the politics advanced by student organizations themselves. The recognition of the multi-class nature of the student movement is central to our understanding of student struggles. Where we differ from the YCL is that instead of advocating the unity of students from all classes under an innocuous bourgeois-democratic movement and politics (imagining that democratic demands exist apart from the class struggle; more on this later), we advocate that proletarian students organize themselves on the basis of proletarian politics, and in the service of the broader working class movement. This in turn implies recognition that revolution in Canada will not be based on campuses (indeed, proletarian students are likely in the minority on university campuses in English Canada), and instead proletarian students should direct their activities towards the broader class struggle rather than this or that campus issue.

We do not necessarily advocate orienting the “struggle inward”, but we are not against such an orientation either. In fact, we disagree that the “main enemy” is solely the big bourgeoisie; insofar as social-democratic reformist bureaucrats within the labour and student movements also inhibit the development of the class struggle in Canada, these forces constitute a “main enemy” that must be struggled against. However, given that bureaucratic elements are often unable to organize around their political line, they tend to be self-isolating and thus largely ignorable; the majority of our efforts are indeed “outward looking”.

The acknowledgement of the multi-class nature of the student movement and a call to organize students along proletarian lines has no connection, for the MER-RSM at least, to any analysis which sees campuses as “inactive” or students as “apolitical” or “apathetic”. Our insistence on organizing along explicitly radical, militant, and communist (proletarian) political lines suggests that our understanding of the current historical conjecture is quite the opposite! Across Canada the working class is increasingly questioning capitalism; as the Main Political Report correctly mentions, for the vast majority of Canadians there has been no recovery from the 2008 crisis. Our understanding of the current conjecture is that there is a real material basis –possibly for the first time since the Great Depression – for the mass radicalization of large sections of workers, proletarian students included. Thus, it is necessary for communists to advance the radical politics and solutions for which workers will increasingly be looking. Our own experience and success with launching what the YCL Central Committee characterizes as an “ultra-left” student organization requires us to abandon any notions of “apathetic” or “apolitical” students; our organization would not have been possible in such conditions. It is disappointing to see the YCL Central Committee obscure this central point of debate between our two organizations.

We suggest that a central aspect to the YCL’s misunderstanding of the nature of the student movement is a lack of understanding on the fundamental role of education within capitalist society. In section #148, the Report says that education should be thought of as “a right and a tool of emancipation” and not as “a commodity which is integral to the production of a trained modern workforce”. This is in line with the YCL’s conception of education as being a democratic demand, and the student movement as being solely a movement engaged in democratic struggles. But just as we are reminded that the labour movement doesn’t exist in a vacuum (section #161), neither does the student movement or education. Education under capitalism is either a means by which the ruling class produces and reproduces itself, or precisely “a commodity which is integral to the production of a trained modern workforce”, depending on which class position one occupies. Insofar as production is mediated by the logic of capital, so too will education be mediated by this logic. Capital requires labour for its self-valorization, and therefore requires a workforce capable of doing the type of labour necessary according to the law of value for valorization to occur. Education under capitalism, for the vast majority, has the role of producing those specific types of labour that capitalism deems necessary at any given point.

Education under capitalism, and access to education under capital, are not democratic rights or a tools of emancipation, but simply a means by which class position is enforced and by which class distinctions are produced and reproduced. Thus, the slogan “Education is a right!” is not only misleading (it isn’t a right because rights don’t exist), but also falls short of critiquing the nature and role of education under capitalism. For education to be liberating, it must not be subordinated to the needs of capital. This is why the MER-RSM makes a point of calling for a “broad based education which is scientific and proletarian in nature”; it is not simply enough for the working class to have unfettered access to the university, but rather the working class must destroy the university-as-university and destroy education as it exists under capitalism. This is precisely the political or revolutionary demand that must be put forward by communists, rather than the economistic demand that the YCL puts forward by tailing social-democratic lobby organizations like the CFS.

Throughout all of this, what the YCL Central Committee misses is that there already is a class struggle going on within the student movement. For instance, in the context of the 2012 Quebec Student Strike, how else can we understand the split of the student movement into “greens” (those favouring an end to the strike and tuition hikes) and “reds” (those favouring reduced tuition or an end to tuition)? While it might be easy to dismiss the “greens” as not legitimately part of the student movement, this leads to a debate based on semantics of who can or can’t be considered part of the student movement. We think that a better means of understanding this split is to look at the class forces at play, and understand that this was in fact a manifestation of struggle between students advancing a proletarian political line and a bourgeois political line. And indeed, the absence of any such open struggle except at very low levels in English Canada points to the total domination of the petty-bourgeois or professional “Education is a right!” political line, one that the YCL enthusiastically tails. It is only the incumbent student union bureaucracy that benefits from not bringing class struggle out into the open; supporting the student union bureaucracy is the effect of these calls for unity.

Even if we examine the social-democratic slogan of “Education is a right!” –which suggests that we fight for free tuition and the removal barriers to access to education – we can see a class divide within the student milieu in English Canada. For those students from bourgeois backgrounds, education is a means by which they reinforce their class positions. Thus, bourgeois students benefit from restricting access to education as it is a way of restricting access to their class position. We see this political line manifest itself when bourgeois students complain that increased access to education would make their degrees worth less than they are under the current conditions of restricted access to education. However, for working class students, education is often a means of transcending their class position; thus they benefit, or at least have the potential to benefit, from increased access to education. Even with an incorrect slogan such as “Education is a right!” we can see that the idea that there is a commonality of interests between all students, or that the category of ‘student’ can exist as an all-encompassing identity, does not make sense and is not a scientific understanding of the class forces at play within the student movement. A “democratic demand” such as access to education is actually tied directly in to the class struggle and is a class demand; a “democratic movement” is thus also a class movement, with the class nature of the movement determined by what politics are in command.

At the end of the day, the position put forward by the YCL in the Main Political Report –the conception of education under capitalism as being potentially liberating, support for student union bureaucracy, and against class-struggle – is not a communist political line but rather a social-democratic line. It is not advancing a proletarian agenda within the student movement, but rather advancing a petty-bourgeois agenda disguised by calls of unity. We hope that comrades in the YCL will correct their approach.

The MER-RSM hopes that this critique gives members of the YCL points to consider as the communist movement in Canada continues to grow and re-orient itself towards a proletarian and revolutionary politics. We urge revolutionary minded comrades within the YCL to either vote down or amend the Main Political Resolution to bring it in line with the communist approach advanced by the MER-RSM as a means of moving towards greater unity between our two organizations. The path to communism in this country will not be easy to traverse, but it will be only possible to achieve communism with the correct political approach to the pressing questions of our day. “Unity and Militancy”, as the Report is titled, are both important: but it must be a real proletarian militancy, and a unity around correct politics. We look forward to hearing the results of your Central Convention, and make ourselves available to answer any questions about our line or practice you may have.

This week, students, faculty and staff at York University were attacked by blatant racism on campus. Flyers created by Immigration Watch Canada (IWC) depicting students of colour as a threat to white Canada were circulated on the York University Keele campus. Similar flyers were also distributed across the York Village, where many of the university’s students live. IWC is a notorious white supremacist group which was in the news earlier this month for flyering racist anti-immigration posters across the city of Brampton. Their expansion into York University indicates an escalation of their racist calls for a white nation. Their white supremacist demands include severe reductions in immigration, limitations on the entry of racialized peoples into Canada, and no recognition of the historical and ongoing colonization of the indigenous peoples of this land.

As students, faculty members, and community members of colour at York University we are deeply affected by the IWC’s abrasive actions, which are designed to intimidate and immobilize communities of colour. The language that people of colour are “invading” Canada, used by the IWC flyers instigates a mood of panic. This is a historically recurring narrative of white supremacy and colonization in Canada. Historical and contemporary examples include the refused entry of the Komagata Maru, the “yellow peril” propaganda and internment of Japanese Canadians, fear mongering around refugees arriving on the Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea, and the changes to temporary migrant labour laws that now systematically deny workers of colour access to services and pathways to citizenship.”

The Third National Conference of Revolutionary Students and youths, held March 1 and 2, was a success. It further solidified the determination of young revolutionaries from across Ontario, Quebec, and BC in building the kind of organization that’s capable of leading the masses of oppressed and exploited youths in Canada.

Attendees from the conference will report back on the resolutions adopted at the conference. They will also share the knowledge they gained from talking with other revolutionary students and youths.

Revolutionary students and youth who were not at the conference, but who are interested in building a combative, anti-capitalist student and youth movement should come out and discuss the kind of work they’re interested in doing.

Together, we can further the development of a real power to defeat the bourgeoisie in Canada.

The capitalist system is rotten! Down with the system that sucks the blood of proletarian students and youth!

A primer written by the Revolutionary Student Movement – University of Toronto chapter

Situation of proletarian First Nations and Canadian youth

Proletarian youth make up a large fraction of the Canadian population! Living in this country means our lives are shaped by the capitalist state’s exploitation of people, plunder of the land, and of resources. Capitalism exists for profit and for expansion, both outside and inside Canada’s borders.

Today, corporations are fleeing the country to set up factories, call centres and offices where labour is cheapest. They’re importing temporary migrant workers from the “global south.” What does this mean for working-class youth? It means that we experience a high unemployment rate of 20%. That’s 1 out of 5 youth! For immigrant youth, the rate is closer to 1 out of 3!

What prospects are left to us? Jobs that are, on whole, non-permanent and casual. These kinds of jobs increases underemployment and subjects youth to precarious work. Nowadays, immigrant youth are competing with, and/or working side-by-side with their parents as well as other temporary migrant workers.

The education system in Canada is embroiled with contradictions. Out of 10 youth, only 4 continue to post-secondary education. This rate is even lower amongst First Nations, Black, Latino and Filipino youth. Those who make it to post-secondary education are plunging themselves deeper into debt as tuition fees and student loans continue to rise at a rate faster than inflation. We work hard to stay in school and graduate with a degree, only to join the ranks of unemployed and underemployed.

While youth in Canada and all over the world have mobilized against worsening poverty, military occupation, and imperialist wars, politicians are putting more money into building super-jails and funding psychiatric mega-complexes. The ruling class deals with our “unruliness” by throwing us in jails and into the psychiatric system; this is especially the case with First Nations, Black, Latino and Southeast Asian youth, who are overrepresented in the prison system.

It is in this context that the Transitional Year Programme (TYP) exists. TYP is full-time, 8-month, access to University program for adults who do not have formal qualifications for university. The majority of TYP students are First Nations, Black, single mothers, and other working-class people. A number of TYP students are also survivors of the criminal justice and psychiatric systems.

Post-secondary education has become the minimum requirement for a many sectors of industry in the country. While post-secondary graduates face increasing rates of un/underemployment, not having access to a degree puts proletarian youth at an especial disadvantage – resulting in fewer career options and channels them to lower-paid, more precarious jobs.

It is in this context that the University of Toronto administration is threating to eliminate TYP!

The People’s History of the Transitional Year Programme (TYP)

Influenced by the militant student movement of the 60s and early 70s , the founders of TYP were students themselves. They saw the need to create a specific program that will prepare working-class, Black students to access post-secondary education, while at the same time, transforming the university to become a site of revolutionary struggle.

Timeline:

1968: The Black Education Project (BEP) opened a the Universal Negro Improvement Association building at 355 College St.; That summer, BEP prepared Black students for admission to York University and the University of Toronto

1970: the summer program was relocated to Innis College at the University of Toronto and included other communities – Native, working-class youth and women; after many negotiations with the University, a full-time TYP was opened

1970 – 1976: TYP operates as an “equal opportunity” program at UofT, a traditional and elitist institution; the program was constrained by inadequate funding and constant scrutiny; institutional support was tenuous

1976: The Crowe Report was published, citing “racial tensions, administrative problems and Marxist content in the curriculum as endangering the program;” the report criticized the program’s community participation

1976-1977: University administration temporarily suspended TYP resulting to denial of access to 50 students; Father John Kelly of St. Michael’s College was selected by the university to carry out another review of the program

1977: TYP was resumed after restructuring, administration now reports directly to the Provost –new changes sacrificed early community involvement

1982: TYP moves into its current home, 49 St. George Street

2009: UofT administration threatens to dismantle TYP; the mobilization of the Transitional Year Program Preservation Alliance (TYPPA), an alliance of TYP students, alumni and non-TYP students postponed the elimination

2011: The university launches a $2-billion fundraising campaign: Boundless, which includes “Access and Opportunity” as one of its priorities

Summer of 2013: UofT administration threatens to seize 49 St. George to make space for the construction of the Centre for Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship; plans relocate TYP to Woodsworth College; Provost instructs TYP administration to suspend hiring of sessional faculty

Fall of 2013: TYPPA launches “Expand the TYP” campaign; current TYP students conduct survey amongst peers and identify three main demands:

1) to stay in 49 St. George or be relocated to a space that serves their needs

2) guaranteed autonomy

3) boundless expansion

Revolutionary perspectives on the TYP and the university

For the Revolutionary Student Movement, the establishment and existence of the Transitional Year Programme was an overt political effort to proletarianize education in a myriad of ways: in increasing the admission of proletarian students in campus, providing accessible and tangible support for its students, and in designing and delivering a progressive curriculum.

TYP students have the option of taking courses from different streams – majority of them intended to relate to the students’ experiences of oppression and encourage critical thought. Because of TYP’s autonomy over curriculum development and implementation, many courses study significant anti-colonial, anti-capitalist literature. While supporting students to successfully complete post-secondary education, TYP itself provides a temporary refuge from the brutal material conditions that its students struggle with on the day-to-day.

For the Revolutionary Student Movement, the pending elimination of the TYP is a testament to the active role played by the university in the capitalist and imperialist system! The dismantlement of TYP means that the university will continue to bar more working-class youth from entering its gates, and that it has and will continue to be bought out by its corporate donors. While threating the program’s dismantlement, it even had administered tuition schemes to either discourage poor students from applying or bury them into further debt!

Despite heavy student opposition, the university is moving forward with replacing the back campus with toxic astroturf in preparation for the PanAm games in 2015. At the same time, it has chosen to fund the parasitical expansion of the Munk School of Global Affairs, Rotman School of Management, and the Engineering department . It’s becoming more obvious that this institution aims to be the centre of knowledge production that supports & justifies military occupation, extractive industries, and imperialist expansion.

We are not fooled by the Boundless campaign’s promises for the community: its aim of “exploring of the University and its community for global leadership” means nothing but dedicating the university to reproduce the next generation of the global bourgeoisie, as well as its defenders, functionaries and sentinels of the existing class society!

For years, the university’s top administration at least went as far as to tokenize the TYP, referring to it as the “jewel in the crown of the university.” Now they deem TYP too costly, and have slowly reduced its budget so much that it compromised the success of its students. When asked why the TYP has not seen any money raised from the Boundless campaign, we were told that TYP should hire its own “fundraising agent!”

What seems to be hypocrisy from the university is no surprise to us, proletarian and racialized students. We know the that TYP doesn’t fit into the university’s renewed commitment to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie!

What needs to be done

A closer look at the history of TYP reveals its revolutionary roots. It was an initiative that was started by proletarian students who recognized the colonial and capitalist ideology propagated in the university, which at the same time, barred racialized and poor students from accessing resources that would allow them to engage and produce critical thought & pedagogy.

For us then, there is no better time than now to preserve and ultimately, expand the Transitional Year Programme! It must be once again led by its founders, the students, serve as an access program to proletarian students, and be at the forefront of the production of revolutionary thought and practice.

In the words of one of its founders, Horace Campbell, “the success of the TYP should result in the removal of the need for TYP when the school system and university at the base of the struggle for democracy.”

The particular campaign for the expansion of the TYP is in line with RSM’s larger struggle to proletarianize the university. The role of the Revolutionary Students Movement is to take education back into the hands of the proletariat, by demanding:

University of Toronto to increase the admittance rates of proletarian youth via programs like the TYP, free of charge and with full state subsidy..

University of Toronto to respond the democratic process through abolishing the Governing Council, an undemocratic body, and replacing it with a democratically elected body, representative of the students, staff and faculty, for decision-making.

University of Toronto to revolutionize its educational content, so as to expose: first, the role of Canadian imperialism and capitalism in the genocide and oppression of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples, as well as proletarians of the third world; and second, the way by which oppressed people have gained liberation through struggle.

Ultimately, these demands cannot be achieved under capitalism. Thus, these demands serve as a preliminary programme for educational reform after the capture of state power and during the transition to communism. The capitalist system cannot satisfy the needs addressed by these points, which reflect the advanced aspirations of proletarian students, and that conflict must ultimately come to a head.

In order to win this struggle, we urge all proletarian, progressive and revolutionary students to join our fight in the expansion of the Transitional Year Programme, and waging a campaign to further proletarianize the campus. We want to lead the transformation of university into a site of revolutionary class struggle!